Life is grand

No doubt you have heard of the “attention economy.” Some of you may even be involved in it; building attention profiling systems, paying your users for their attention data and so forth.

Cast your thoughts further though and read how an attention economy transcends money:

(In fact, already, the vast majority of people who use the Internet mostly seek only attention and not money; thus the proliferation of blogs, MySpace, Flikr, YouTube videos, comments, statements to listservs, etc. ) Thus, the Attention Economy is a completely different kind of economy, post-industrial, post-market and post-money.

from What “A New Kind of Economy” Means

Where most of the current players in the attention industry think of paying and being paid money for attention is the way, Michael H. Goldhaber says it goes beyond that. Paying money for attention data is the current economy.

It is an interesting thought though not without a whiff of fear (no money? You have got to be kidding) and a bit of the ridiculous (no money? You have got to be kidding.)

I wonder how it pertains to those who go, for instance, hiking for 6 months in the mountains. These folk are paying attention to the mountain, to nature, and by doing so survive, perhaps?

At its core is paying attention a survival mechanism? Whether that is survival on the internet, on a mountain, in a city or amongst a country community. I’d like to think so. That with attention money is no longer needed.

But I do worry though that attention simply replaces money and remains as perverted; attention to rock-stars and celebrities, attention to the rich and the attention seeking. Already we see on the supposedly infallible world wide web the irrational wealth of a-list bloggers. We pay them attention and they survive off that.

Perhaps as we move into the attention economy we redistribute our thoughts on what we desire and need.

A feature I’d like Bloglines to implement is one that tracks the links I click on from feeds. Each time I read a post in a feed and click through to its link I’d like Bloglines to record that.

Why?

So that every now and then I can look at what feeds are generating the most number of actual clicks which is a reasonable, though not infallible, indicator of quality.

Other attention data from Bloglines would be great to help in determining which feeds are of actual value to me. Sometimes I find it hard to remember from where I read an interesting item and so find it hard culling feeds.

Ed Batista reported on Josh Porter’s Social Networks Are Killing Email to which I objected.

Obviously Josh was thinking further though as he came up with A Messaging Proxy and Domain as Identity. Interesting idea, I like it. Amazon’s SQS could potentially be a part of it and provide the reliability that is needed. I reckon it would need to be distributed too, having your messaging system go down due to a server fault or a company glitch would be a big problem. I also think we need to keep email in mind as we can learn a good deal from it as well as remember the vast amounts of archived messages many of us have and need to keep.

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.

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.

Ed makes a good point on my list of attention sucking silos:

Apple, iTunes and his Nano are all potentially-connected segments of the same silo

Semi-ideally*, Ed is right. Apple is the silo and Apple is all knowing of my Apple.com, Apple Store, iTunes and nano silos.

But who here has worked in a large company with large databases spread across a large range of concepts? Ten to one the arse of Apple doesn’t know what the head of Apple has stored on me. Ten to one there is not a central Apple identity and attention server that aggregates all my Apple activites. I’ll bet my iTunes attention data is separate to my Apple Store attention data. They are probably running different systems in there with no linkage.

I don’t even need to go into Apple HQ to know this. My nano and my iTunes’ silos are already broken. I use last.fm and think it is a wonderful service. Before I got my nano I played 90% of my daily music on my laptop. That 90% was reported through iTunes to last.fm. However I now have a nano and that “what music has Paul played today” link has been broken. When I jack my nano into my laptop every evening iTunes does not suck down the play data and send it onto last.fm**. I actually cannot see what iTunes does with my nano data.

Another example is iTunes and the music I have bought elsewhere. I’ve ripped all my “physical” CDs into iTunes yet when I go to the Apple Music Store and check out the “recommended” lists I will often find recommendations to albums I already own. iTunes and the Apple Music Store are not communicating. They have all this play and asset data on me yet fail to link it all up.

So while they may conceptually be segmented areas of one mega-silo they are effectively separate silos.

* I say semi because ideally my “Apple” silo wouldn’t be one. Currently there is a silo there though and if it has to remain then ideally it should not be segmented.

** Technically there are plug-ins for iTunes that link your iPod to your last.fm account. I have tried at least three and could not get them to work. Considering I am a developer you’d think I could figure it out.

Following on from Tom Carroll…

• iTunes
• My iPod nano
• Google
• XTravision
• Credit Cards
• Microsoft
• ISP
• Yahoo
• eBay
• Amazon
• My optometrist
• HP
• Cell phone provider
• My employer
• Local Government
• My hosting provider
• Apple
• Airlines
• Hotels
• Del.icio.us and BlinkList
• Linkedin
• Firefox
• Flickr
• last.fm
• Far too many Web 2.0 Beta sign-ups

Are you paying attention? If so then you can get me on Root Vaults with the vault name of PaulMWatson.

Alongside feeds (RSS, Atom etc.) this is the next big wave of the net. Passive recording of your attention stream. Each click you make stored and shared with who you want. The services that can be built on the back of that stream are going to be deadly.

Next we need to get your email client, feed reader, instant messenger and file browser hooked in. Want to know what site you were browsing when you emailed your boss that great idea? No problem, it’s recorded and you can get it.