Life is grand

As much as I like running the Attention Recorder it is obviously still in its early stages as managing it between multiple machines is not easy. The main problem is the Domain Blacklist. Whenever I add a new domain into my work machine I have to do the same on my laptop. Then today I installed the GestureBank recorder and had to copy all the domains out of the Attention Recorder into it.

Fortunatley if you are a bit techy you can make this easier by opening your Firefox prefs.js file and finding the line that starts like so; user_pref(”attention.blackListDomains”. You can take the value of that and copy it into the other key/value pair that starts with; user_pref(”gesturebank.blackListDomains”.

Thinking about it I wonder if I can simply sync my prefs.js file between machines. I’d love it if it were that simple to sync Firefox and extensions such as GestureBank.

Ultimately though my Attention Trust blacklist shouldn’t be stored with the recorder but with my Attention Trust account. Somewhere. Out there. On the web.

I have written a rather long post on what is happening with Colib. It goes into my thoughts on attention trust data, S3, federation, microformats and a host of other bits. Hopefully it sparks something.

Until the day that Windows, Mac and Linux have an attention trust recorder running as a default service on boot we are going to have to get websites to emit attention data.

Everytime I do a Google search let Google send my search and whatever result I choose to my attention data store. Everytime I view a photo on Flickr, let Flickr send that URL to my attention store. When I Gmail, let Gmail send. When I del.icio.us, when I WordPress and when I TechCrunch; send.

Reverse website analytics in a way. The hit counter emits to your attention store “Thanks for visiting.”

Root.net has released a handy little widget that displays your attention trust data, in this case your click trends. Top clicks, gainers and losers as you can see below.

This is a lovely idea as it allows people to passively show what they are interested in. You don’t have to do anything extra. Just put the widget somewhere that people can see, have your Attention Recorder on and browse.

There is one problem with the widget though. As you can see my top “click” is pagead2.googlesyndication.com which I assume is some Google AdSense service and is not something I have ever actively clicked on. Next is BlinkList, GMail, Google and BlogLines. Those are all services that I use all day but are not terribly interesting to anyone else. You really don’t need to know I use GMail all day, it is my main email client.

The widget needs a filter list so that I can filter out these common sites and let you rather see the new sites and pages I am paying attention too. Hopefully the Root.net team can implement this.