Until now i never paid much attention to blogposts on attention. I thought this was a theoretical discussion by the big thinkers from the blogosphere.
This morning a came across the post ‘AttentionTrust and GestureBank‘ by Steve Gilmore and decided to dive into the attention thing so i could at least understand what this post was about.
The resource to learn about ‘attention’ is attentiontrust.org. The core idea behind the project is:
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.
Further the site states that you have the following rights: Property, You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish. You have CONTROL. Mobility, You can securely move your attention wherever you want whenever you want to. You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention. Economy, You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Your attention has WORTH. Transparency You can see exactly how your attention is being used. You can DECIDE who you trust.
Still a little vague to me. But things got clearer once i installed the Attention Recorder, which is a firefox extension (not available for ie yet). This extension ‘records’ every page you visit, and stores this information in an xml-file (in AttentionDataXMLFormat):
<httptransaction>
<title>Justplain</title>
<url>http://www.justplain.org</url>
<cookie>1</cookie>
<setcookie>0</setcookie>
<responsecode>200</responsecode>
<method>GET</method>
<date>Sat, 25 Mar 2006 14:06:41 GMT</date>
</httptransaction>
As you can see, for every pagevisit the pagetitle, the url, some cookie information, the http responsecode, the applied method (GET/POST) and a datestamp (why always that format??) is stored. The xml-file with this data is stored on your local-drive and if you want to you can choose to exchange the file with a ‘AttentionTrust Approved Services’. Right now there are two to choose from, from which one is a test-service from attentiontrust self, if i do understand it correctly. 
The other one is Root Vault, ‘the first trading platform for the pricing and exchange of realtime consumer data’.
I don’t exactly understand their business, in the about section they state that Root is:
Founded on the premise that the consumer has the right to her data, ROOT Markets is the first financial exchange for consumer leads. Leads are personal data that express an individual’s intent to purchase. The quality of our leads at ROOT Markets is driven by our ability to qualify intentions through consumer focused applications. Root Markets is an active supporter of AttentionTrust.org, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping consumers keep track of and benefit from their online activity.
Mmm, i like attention but this does not sound like the kind of attention i want, i allready get to much attention from financial marketeers. The attentionTrust website’s philosophy sounds good and they also give me 4 rights on my attention data, so i decided to sign up for an account on root.net. I chose the ‘Concumer / account’ (Control and Manage your digital identity,mmm sounds good, did not know i had one 
) and logged in. Once you are logged in you can exchange your attention data with the service and view all kinds of information on your browsing behaviour (screenshot).
I still don’t feel like i fully understand the whole concept. I thought it would be more of something like an automated dig.com. That would work like ‘Hey, so you like this post, then you probably like this one also…’. Maybe i’m distracted by the fact that root.net is focused on mortgage leads which does not make me feel like i should trust this service.
The ‘gesturebank’ that Steve Gilmore is talking about in his post sounds like the missing link that will clearify the whole idea for me and will give us right #3 -> Your attention has WORTH, you get something in return.
I will have to do more studying to get my finger on this attention-thing. I think i’m going to start by listening to the last Gillmore Gang which handles ‘gestures’.
Btw, if you want to start your own AttentionTrust service, you can download the Attention Toolkit (php) with which you can record “attention data” from the AttentionTrust Extension into a MySQL database.
tags: Attention AttentionTrust Steve Gillmore attentiontrust xml
