AttentionTrust.org Explained Better

I found some more clarification about AttentionTrust.org here by Steve Gillmor via this in my trackbacks. Andrew, in his usually eloquent manner, is not clear what the AttentionTrust.org is.  He's looking for a bit more practical explanation: 

...take a moment, put down the Technorati flavored kool-aid, look away from Slash-dot or John Battelle’s blog, or whatever you were looking at, put the Always On magazine back under the mattress, and think about what AttentionTrust does, and how they do it. Hell, even what they intend to do, and how they intend to do it. Please try not to blindly tow the company line on this one. Once you have thought about that, explain it to me, in less than 50 words, so that I can understand it. Because I don’t.

For anyone still not clear about this (including myself), I'd reccommend digging into Attention.xml. Also, microformats (or some equivalent) will be key to this. (Both of those are technorati initiatives.) And neither are out of the labs yet. I also recommend reading this treatise by Steve Gillmor:

What does matter is a pool of attention metadata owned by the users. This open cloud of reputational presence and authority can be mined by each group of constituents. Users can barter their attention in return for access to full content, membership priviliges, and incentives for strategic content. Vendors can build on top of that cloud of data with their own special sauce–the newbie crowd of MyYahoo, the pacesetter early adopters of Diller/Ask/Bloglines, the social attention farm of RoJo, and Google's emerging Office service components orchestrated by the core GMail inforouter. And the media, which now includes publishers, analysts, researches, rating services, advertisers, sponsors, and underwriters, can use the data as a giant inference engine for leveraging the fat middle of the long tail.

And here's my 50 cent explanation based mostly on what Steve wrote in the article the excerpt above was taken-from. My explanation - without the name dropping (people and companies) and without the technical jargon and web 2.0 marketing fancy talk - is:

As we use the web, we reveal lots of information about ourselves by what we pay attention to.  Imagine if all of that information could be stored in a nice neat little xml file. And when we travel around the web, we can optionally share it with websites or other people. We can make them pay for it, lease it, scream for it "show me the money", barter for it, whatever. The important point is that we get to decide who has access to it, how long they have access to it, and what we want in return. And they have to tell us what they are going to do with our Attention data. But, the possibility of having all of that information within our control and being able to share it with anyone - is huge. It opens up  the marketplace to anyone with the right product. It gives marketers the ability to plug into this data and serve us better. It gives new startups with clever algorithms the ability to bust out onto the scene.

On a more practical sense, one thing a website could do is have their machines read it to try and understand what each of us are seeking in life (love, one-ness with God, money, sex, a date for Friday, a new car, a new house, a new potato slicer) and they can offer it up to us. If Bob Saget is looking for a potato slicer, Acme Potato Slicer Inc may send him one for free if he lets them tell the world they sent him one. Bob Saget's attention is worth a whole lot. If you are Kevin Federline and you are looking for condoms, (Please look for condoms, Kevin.) Trojan will probably pay you to use them. Who knows what they'll do? Who knows what each individual's attention is worth?

Contrast that with the way marketing is done online now. You go to a website or download a toolbar. They track what they can. They don't share what they know about you with you or anyone else. It is their asset to exploit. They might use it themselves or they might just make pretty graphs with it. They might sell it to someone who sells it to someone. Most sites, except for yahoo  don't really use it. And most ad networks, except for the behavioral targeting ones like Revenue Science, aren't really leveraging it. Besides, did we really give them permission to do that? Well, yes, we did. When we clicked that "I agree to your Terms of Service" check box. But, we gave it away. What a new crop of startups and companies are doing is making that Terms of Service a bit more amenable to what you really want. You want to control who knows what about you.  You want to leverage your valuable attention/time/spending power so you get what you deserve. That's what AttentionTrust.org is championing. And if it works, then we should be getting served the way we want to get served.

And if you read Steve Gillmor's piece on it, there are certainly plenty of companies with lots of resources that are working on this. So, I guess we'll have to wait and see what actually happens. As of now, I am a believer. And I am excited to see what companies get on this bandwagon.

Still BullShit, Andrew?

Comments

[Michal Migurski]

I understand (and even drink a little kool-aid), but I don't get how this is not a pyramid scheme. The Bob & Kevin examples you describe are just product endorsements, the same thing Nike or Pepsi do all the time. How does this idea filter down to regular people, given that at some point, Trojan is going to need some coin for their rubbers? Attention.xml remains a chimera for the foreseeable future. The kinds of companies to whom this concept will be useful will *not* be brick & mortar, because those firms will still need money & resources to make products. Instead, I imagine that this will be useful to attention brokers, who aggregate attention over large groups of people to gather marketing data.

[peter caputa]

Good point, Mike!

I am just thinking outloud in response. But here are some possible benefits to us:

1. Better targeting of ads. Instead of targeting ads contextually to the content we are reading, ads can be targeted with fancier algorithms that take into account what we looked at yesterday and last year + what we're looking at + what other information we give up. Why? Cause we have all that data and we can share it with whomever we want. Contrast that to now, when yahoo has a little data, google has a bit, msn has some, ad networks have a little more, blogging tools have some, del.icio.us has some, etc, etc.

2. Middle men will still exist. They'll just be everywhere. And the barrier to being a new middle man isn't the SIZE of the middle man. They aren't just people that make sitcoms and print newspapers, deliver ads+search or write weblogs. They'll be all kinds of stuff. Yahoo's new Konfabulator widgets could be an attention aggregator. They'll be all kinds of new services. And if those services can leverage all the attention data that we've accumulated from now until then, they'll be able to start adding value as soon as their launched. Similarly, the faster you create "attention data", the more value you can add to the system. And the more value you'll be worth.

What this effectively does, in my thinking-outloudedness, is lower the barrier to entry for new creations, new players because they can leverage our past attention.

It won't wipe out the Long Tail. Or give you as much Trojan buying power as Kevin Federline. But, it'll get you closer.

[Craig W Barnes]

We eat, sleep, and breathe attenttoin data - or what we call "attention streams" - and the benefits to users will go well beyond better more targeted advertising. We are utilizing attention stream data now (a lightweight transient superset of what attention.xml is all about) and at the end of the day users will automatically get fewer, more relevant and re-prioritized articles (not feeds, ARTICLES) We chatted with Seth today and we support attentiontrust wholeheartedly.

[Jenn M.]

The piece that always gets me about Amazon etc. is that once I've bought whatever item I'm searching for, these guys continue to badger me with "If you liked that, you'll like this!" If I'd bought a gift for a friend's baby shower and never intend to be near children again, I still always get that cute little rattle on my The Page You Created ad infinitum.

The piece that the Attention people haven't addressed is the finite nature of searches and interests. I may be searching for a vacation for my 10th anniversary, but by my 11th, I'll be very tired of seeing yet another cruise that I have no intention of taking.

I'm looking for an Un-Attention button, to tell people that I really have absolutely no interest in what I was just looking for.

[Peter Caputa]

Good point, Jenn. I am sure that someday, we'll have an unattention button or no thanks button.

Wouldn't be a great world, if consumers actually clicked on an ad and said I am not interested in that?

Imagine the targeting we could do then.

[Todd]

About this I think the difference between “Attention” and “Privacy” is the idea that “Attention” is a commodity. It is something you can sell, trade, buy, etc.. “Privacy,” on the other hand, is a right or, at the very least, cannot be sold.

I think this is an important distinction and I agree with Josh that the “Attention Economy” is a place where users need to exercise more control. Companies have been buying and selling our attention with no benefit or compensation to the user. To the contrary, we users often suffer when their attention is sold in the form of unsolicited telemarketing calls, spam, etc.

[Peter Caputa]

Very well said, Tood. Very succinct and on point. Agree totally.