Somewhere someone is thinking of you… as an ad impression. That was the sentiment in 2006. Facebook had just released its news feed feature, Twitter had just launched to its early adopters and concerned technologists were questioning the affects of these transformative new platforms. Co-author of Cluetrain Manifesto Doc Searls was one of them. In the early days of the realtime web,  the glut of new data sources proved taxing to our analogue brains. We were in information overload and thoroughly shutting down. In fact, the New York Times estimated that the average consumer was exposed to more than 2000 brand messages a day. For content creators and advertisers, reaching readers was no longer a problem of distribution, it was a problem of rising above the noise. Audiences were becoming  immune to standard advertising and the words on everyone’s lips were ”attention economy”. This marked the year that our “eyeballs” became commoditized and our attention became a scarce resource and this was the year Doc Searls proposed an alternative — “The Intention Economy“. Searls offered a model where sellers stopped messaging into the noise and instead recognized consumer purchasing power and worked to meet their demands. He believed there was an opportunity for regular buyers to control their exposure to third party messages and even decide on what personal information was collected. In his own words, The Intention Economy w
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