November 27, 2005
Reification of Attention
Most of us have never thought of our "attention" as a tangible thing. Advertising executives surely do, though. And so do a group of people led by Steve Gillmor who created a non-profit organization called AttentionTrust.org.
According to the thinking of this group, your "attention data" is valuable, and you should have the right to control it. Attention data is the record of your past online activities that indicate where your attention has been. Attention data has predictive power, which is why it's valuable to advertisers -- they want to know what will grab your attention and what you will immediately dismiss. Above all, AttentionTrust.org believes you should have the right to control how your attention data is used, and even negotiate the terms for its use.
Recently, one of the directors of AttentionTrust.org has launched a new company called Root Markets, with plans to build a business around attention data. The concept of the business is abstract, but the basic idea is to act as a broker of attention data.
This all seems incredibly abstract to me. And so, I have to ask this question: Can AttentionTrust.org and Root Markets gain any broad acceptance if the "attention" of the average person does not include an interest in attention data? The point is this: the ideas of "attention" are far too abstract to be of any interest to the average person.
Posted by Doug Sauder at November 27, 2005 10:37 AM