Can I have your Attention.xml Please?

From Jeff Clavier:

David Sifry: We all own our attention data (clicks, reads,...) and whilst it is OK for service providers to host them, fundamentally it is ours (the users). This attention data needs to be expressed in a way that makes it easy to aggregate it across streams and providers. This is what attention.xml is about: a simple file format expressing what I have been spending time on.

Glenn Reid: Contends that such data is not being recorded. And gets ran over by the rest of the panel that mentions all the tracking made by Yahoo, Google, MSN, eBay, Amazon,...

Doree Duncan Seligmann: Avaya has developed Personal Workspaces that manages workers availability, interruptability,... and manage flows of phone calls according to these parameters.

Steve Gillmor polls the audience about the use of an RSS aggregators. Just a few hands are raised by people not using one. A large proportion is using a client aggregator, which is interesting since my stats say clearly otherwise. And there is strong interest in synchronizing all read marks across systems, devices and programs.

Note that this feature will be available from NewsGator in their forthcoming release (across web, outlook and mobile). But that is one from vendor only at this point, and attention.xml should hopefully allow us to get this same functionality across the industry.

One aspect not addressed by the panel is how attention.xml will be implemented, and when we'll start seeing it included in commercial products, besides Yahoo's efforts.

Doc Searls:

Methinks attention is a demo sell, and we haven't seen it yet. Once Technorati (where it's being worked on) or somebody else serving the long tail does something useful with it, the world will rock. Meanwhile, we'll roll along in quiet expectation, waiting for the tech to get ready.

More at a later date.

Update: Nick Bradbury:

I've written about attention and privacy before, but I haven't really talked about the second point, which is where it gets tricky.  Your attention data is very valuable to the services that collect it, so there's not a lot of incentive for them to give it back to you.  But even though you're paying those services by giving them your attention data, that shouldn't mean that they own it.  It's your data, and you should be able to share it with other services so that they can use it to make recommendations for you

And that's what I'm asking you to blog about (or, if you don't have a blog, comment here). If you believe that you should own your attention data, now is the time to sound off about it. You don't need to link to me or even mention me in your blog - just make sure to include "RSS and Attention" in your entry's title so that everyone who pays attention to this subject (ie: Microsoft, Google, myself, etc.) can find you. I'm taking Microsoft at their word that they'll listen to the conversation while designing their RSS support, so let's test them on this.

Greg Yardley.

Comments

[Allen Searls]

This is good stuff. I was in the audience at Supernova, then Gnomedex when Steve was asking this question, I think he asked pretty much the same question in both cases, but can't remember. Either way, synchronizing metadata from client-based aggregators to web-based aggregators seems to be one, if not the, immediate problem to solve, and may give attention.XML a short-term concise purpose and thus some momentum and definition. I can't wait to start experimenting with it myself, but I agree we need something to sink our teeth into, an implementation somewhere, anywhere, to try out and point to and get the snowball rolling.