Session 10: The Attention Economy

As mentioned in the lecture, attention economy is a new economy. The attention can be seen as property or wealth because they can help you to do business and earn money.

The Openrice website is one of the platforms developing the attention economy. Openrice is a website that people can share and comment on the restaurants that they dine at. People can post photos of the dishes and share their feedback. They can also select whether the restaurant is good or bad.

When I want to find a good restaurant in Kowloon Tong, I can go to Openrice website and see the comment of others. The website has a ranking of good restaurant and bad restaurant. Some good restaurants are in great attention, so more and more people will go and try. On the other hand, the bad restaurant can also in great attention, but less people will go and try. This shows that under the attention economy, people can choose a good restaurant easily.

However, I will not always trust on the ranking. As I know, some of the restaurants are not that bad. However, their locations have low accessibility. Less people will go; the ranking on Openrice is low. So I recommend all of you to look for some new good restaurant but not just rely on Openrice.

Session 8: Games learning and literacy

In Hong Kong, games are very popular. We have NDS, PSP, Wii etc. in the market. If you do not have these game devices, you can also play games online. iphone is very popular recently. Many game applicants can be found on iphone.

Recently, I am addicted to Coin Dozer on iphone. It is actually a very interesting game. Players can place coins in the machine. The machine will push the coins down to the front, those are pushed down to the front will belong to the players.  The players can collect money by pushing coins to the front. However, there are two gaps on both sides of the machine. The coins pushing into the gaps will not be counted. Apart from pushing coins, there are many additional gifts for special functions. For example, some gifts can help you to have more coins when you have coin shower as a bonus.

This game actually is quite old in Hong Kong. However, because of the strategy of collecting gifts and coins, it becomes one of the most popular games in iphone application.

I believe for the games which have to collect thing can be very popular quickly. This is because every player wants to collect more and more which can contribute to the popularity. This shows that strategy of game designing is a very challenging and important work. I cannot be the programmer of designing games, but I hope more and more can get my attention in the coming future.

Happy reading!