Competition for Attention

This paper introduces ‘Competition for Attention’ as a conceptual design paradigm for agent-based multi-media applications. Our aim is to allow for the relative independent development of information services, on the one hand, and value-added agent-based services on the other, and to enable their smooth integration in a particular on-line application. The underlying and long-term objective is to deal in a principled way with the scaling problem, allowing for agentbased applications with hundreds to millions of active agents. Although we have not yet fully realized these objectives, the paper describes three phases of an existing practical application that demonstrates the step that we have taken toward this goal. The application is an on-line WWW service for Brussels summer movie festival Ecran Total. In three consecutive years, three agent-based applications have been developed with increasingly enhanced methodological and technical support for realizing the Competition for Attention paradigm.