This week I joined Attention Trust. Steve Gilmore is the president and Mary Hodder is the Chair of the advisory board. It seems like a great application for the Identity systems we are working on.
What Matters?
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.
Nick Bradbury puts it this way:
I want personalized search. I want my attention data to help tools and services find the stuff that matters to me so I can cut down on information overload. But I only want this if:
1 It’s done in a way that protects my privacy
2 The service that collects my attention data lets me get it back, so I can share it with other services
Much of what they have to say jibes with my thoughts on digital identity and new collaborative finance models and reputation systems and all that abstract stuff that is still too messy for me to explain with much clarity…..I’ll continue to work on that….in the mean time please read Nick’s piece.
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