What if the government could provide a service that everyone would want to use? What if that service was free? What if the government generated profit from that service? There’s no way anything like that could exist, if this were ten years ago.

What if that government truly represented the people? What if people were actively engaged in controlling that government? What if the people could decide how to spend the government revenue? How would society spend free money?

Businesses and other organizations are willing to pay for your attention. Your attention has value. The Internet has changed the distribution of our attention. Where before, it was all focused on a few major outlets, now it is spread across many many more. How many random youtube videos have you watched? Advertising models need to adapt to cope with user produced content.

Now that we live in the future we can make this work to the benefit of everyone. We can unite our attention in a single place, and sell it. We can decide as a community what to do with it.

How do we go about doing this?

In spite of the rampant success of social news sites like digg.com and reddit.com, there is still room for innovation in the social news model. I believe one simple innovation would make these sites immensely more useful to us as a society. That innovation is, the ability of the community to link current stories to previous stories. It would be threaded conversation, with links.