Daily Archives: October 19, 2006

AttentionTrust

Came across this interesting non-profit organization called

When you pay attention to something (and when you ignore something), data is created. This “attention data” is a valuable resource that reflects your interests, your activities and your values, and it serves as a proxy for your attention.

AttentionTrust and our members support the following Principles regarding users’ control of attention data, and we invite you to join us in supporting these Principles by applying for AttentionTrust membership:

  1. Property

    You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish.

  2. Mobility

    You can securely move your attention wherever you want whenever you want to.

  3. Economy

    You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return.

  4. Transparency

    You can see exactly how your attention is being used.

To capture the attention data they have a browser plug-in that creates and stores click-stream data of your web activity. Users then have the option to either store this data on a local drive or put in an on-line “vault”. The “vault” service is provided by 4 different organizations (users can choose) that are approved by AttentionTrust.org. The idea behind these vault services is that it aggregates data and provide a platform, to other for-profit companies to come up with interesting personalized services for users. The users always controls the data and can release it to any service provider they find interesting. Its a really cool idea but I am having a difficult time imagining the kinds of useful services that can be provided to an individual by accessing their attention data. Still, this is a neat idea for enabling much needed research in the users browsing behavior, of course with user consent.

One of the other issues with the overall idea is how can users prevent companies from accessing potentially important or embarassing information from such logs? The attention recorder browser plug-in has a button to disable recording click-stream data but in my experience I found the button hard to use and remember (not that I was visiting any naughty sites :-)). I also looked at the data that attention recorder collected by looking into the XML file and did not find any data related to movement of the mouse…I don’t even know if that is feasible, but one of the things I do when I am reading (not scanning) a web page is follow my eye focus with my mouse movements. So the mouse movements on the browser might be interesting data to gather. The point here is that web browing data is so private (as evidenced by AOL search terms release fiasco) that there are a number of potential landmines here.

Another issue is how AttentionTrust can guarantee that one of these service providers are not going to misuse the information? Some other interesting liks to follow up for more information:

Attention Wiki

Attention Architecture

All-in-all an interesting idea that will develop with time. Thoughts?

Update: Upon further reflection, some of the services that could be made available will be similar to time-share deals in Las Vegas. The idea is that if you sit through a demo for an hour or so of targetted advertizing and you are rewarded for that attention. AttentionTrust provides a verfication mechanism for validating that time spend.

Six Apart and Enterprise Blogging

Six Apart came up with a new version of MoveableType with features for enterprise blogging. TechCrunch and Read/Write Web had a good review of the release. I had a good discussion with Anil Dash (one of the old-timers at Six Apart) on TechCrunch forum:

Jitendra

I am not sure I understand what Six Apart is trying to do here? I buy that enterprise blogging is a big deal and that the blogs are going more and more mainstream (See my old post on the growth of blogosphere) but the driving force behind the blogosphere is really that blogs are more personal and are not typically encumbered with extensive enterprise controls. Enabling enterprise level controls for blogging is gonna make them sound like enterprise press releases which is just not going to be popular…

Anil’s response

Anil
Jitendra, you raise an issue that commonly comes up, but that I don’t necessarily think is a valid concern. You see, offering better management tools for administrators to do things like create blogs more efficiently, or assign permissions and roles more easily, doesn’t inherently compromise the human voice or expressiveness of blogs. We think that giving IT managers better blogs tools makes it easier for them to get out of the way and let users express themselves in a human voice.

Make sense?

My response

Jitendra

Anil,
Thanks for your response.

The issue that worries me with the Six Apart direction is the central control of the blogging infrastrucutre at the enterprise level. To me blogging is essentially an individualistic endeavor where you have an opportunity to connect with your audience at a more personal level. From re-reading Six Apart’s positioning for enterprise blogging, it seems like you guys are trying to make blogging more of a collaboration tool. This might be benefitial to certain companies but its not clear how its different from Wikis in such situations?
Thanks,
Jitendra

I guess there is a possibility of getting some traction in collaboration related usage scenarios, but at what price? What about those crazy and expensive enterprise sales cycles? and what about all those requirements for integration with enterprise infrastructure and identity systems? CMS Wire has a great review.

I still don’t get the rationale behind this move…Do you?