SOCIAL COMPUTING is "the intersection of social behaviour and information technology", says Bernardo Huberman, senior fellow and director at HP's social computing lab.

His lab's work is driven by the explosion of information and what he calls "dynamic cloud services", services that can be delivered in real time, thanks to always-on computing and web services.

He is particularly interested in web-based social systems.

"In the age of Web 2.0, everyone creates," Huberman says. "There's immense competition for your consumption.

"What has value is no longer information, but things that are scarce, such as attention." When attention becomes scarce, he says, it becomes as valuable or even more valuable than money, what he terms "the economics of attention".

But, he says, his lab is not interested in attention from a single individual, but the attention signalled by mass social movement towards something of interest.

"We want to see how novelty and popularity elicit your attention."

They've studied recommendations on Amazon.com to try to better understand how effective viral marketing actually is. The results may surprise: for books, they have very little value, but with DVDs, they noted a high level of buying on recommendation.

"Why is this interesting?" he asks. "If you know the determinants of attention, you can configure sites to maximise hits or decide what to present to maximise the user's value." HP is already using Huberman's methodologies on HP's own websites to maximise traffic.