Attention Please

For some time now I’ve been (casually) following the emerging thought around the “Attention Economy“. Originally I became aware of this thru the now defunct, much missed Gillmor Gang podcast.

The central idea of Attention is that the gestures you make on the web (links you click on, searches you make, bookmarks you accumulate) accumulate value and previously were stored in vendor silos. That is, when you spend a significant amount of time on MSDN or Google Search, those sites capture your Attention Metadata… you don’t keep it, it’s lost to you, and effectively owned by a third party.

So what’s the value of keeping and owning your this data yourself? One possible application is that given this repository of data you might, say, upload it to a service that will provide targeted offers or aid in discovery of new sites, resources, products, etc. based on your clickstream (Attention Metadata). This represents a significant change in the way advertising currently works. Namely, the model changes from push to pull. You carry on through your day and have the agency to decide when to pull advertising (that’s mostly relevant to you) in to your Attention. The whole “User In Control” philosophy…

Cruising over to the AttentionTrust site, I discovered that they’ve released their Attention Recorder. This is a bit of client software implemented as a FireFox extension. It extends the FireFox toolbar with a button that lets you start/stop recording your Gestures.

Once you have this installed you then sign up for a service that will store the information collected and provide some basic analytics (I chose Root Vaults.)

I’m still kind of wondering where the killer app is here. I think, by-and-large, it’s in theory. Regardless I’m starting to collect and own my data anyway. I imagine someday there will be a collection of applications that make use of this information and when there are, I’ll be able to take advantage. If nothing else, it’s kind of interesting to be able to reflect upon where you’ve been on the web and what’s grabbing your interest over time.