From attention economy to attention architecture
This article was originally published in Web 2.0 journal.
I had an interesting chat last night with Chris Saad of Touchstone about their platform and the attention market. The conversation was prompted by the announcement on TechCrunch that one of the leaders in the attention space, RootMarkets, received funding from Chicago Board of Trades. This conversation with Chris and post on TechCrunch got me thinking: we all agree that we are heading towards the attention economy, but what does the “architecture of attention” look like?To make the concept of attention compelling and to prove to the consumers that their attention information is important, we need to build applications that provide useful services. And to build these applications we need a platform for the attention players to plug into. In short, we need attention ecosystem, where application providers can interplay and deliver definitive value to the end users.
The Roots of Attention
It may not be widely known, but the foundations of the attention economy and architecture have been already laid out. Steve Gillmore and Seth Goldstein established AttentionTrust.org – a non-profit organization with a mission to both educate the people about the value of their attention and to establish the infrastructure for capturing individual attention.
The AttentionTrust serves as a forum for discussing and establishing principles, values and rights of consumers. The founders have outlined the following principles for its operation:
- 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.
These founding principles capture the essence of the attention economy. With every click, with every look at the computer screen you are paying attention. This attention information has a huge value, and it can be used to provide you back with valuable services.
The Foundations of Attention Architecture
AttentionTrust.org and RootMarkets, the attention company founded by Seth Goldstein, worked out an architecture for capturing and storing the user attention shown in the Figure 1 below.
The attention is captured by the browser extension, called AttentionRecorder. The recorder simply records which URL the user went to and when. With the recorder the user has an option of either storing the click stream locally or directing it to an AttentionVault.
The vault is essentially a remote database of the user click stream. Since AttentionRecorder defines HTTP-based API for communicating with the vault, their can be multiple implementations.
As shown in the Figure 2 below, the user can configure the AttentionRecorder to send the data to one of the vaults approved by AttentionTrust. This approach facilitates competition between the vault providers and, as advertised, puts the user in control. That is, the user can decide the most trustworthy, fastest, cheapest vault. Another big benefit is that consumer is explicitly part of the attention recording process. So the consumer has to understand how the system works, and so the consumer is more likely to trust the system because of that.
Beyond the basic attention
The initial version of attention architecture is simple, but it is not complete. As the attention space evolves it becomes clear that there is a need to expand it and to re-conceptualize how various applications and services fit in. Lets consider a few examples. The most obvious thing that is not being captured is whether the user liked what she saw. While it is certainly possible to build a good prediction model based on the time that user spent looking at the information, no such model will be complete or exact. In other words, current version of AttentionRecorder captures only implicit attention, but there are also rich variety of explicit attention.
Consider the popular social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. We can think of them as vaults for the explicit individual attention. As a step up from implicit attention, when the user bookmarks a site and sends it to the del.icio.us we know for a fact that she liked the site. We still do not know how much she liked it. This information would be captured by another system – the one that also allows ratings. At adaptiveblue we are developing a higher level attention capturing service called blueorganizer. Beyond the basic URLs and ratings the blueorganizer captures the semantical information contained on the page, such as movies, books, wines and cars, creating basically a vault for semantically-rich attention.
So since there are different kinds of attention, the current architecture needs to be expanded to accommodate them. In particular, we need to recognize that:
- Attention can be captured by different sources
- Attention can come in different formats
- Attention can be stored in different ways
By focusing on these issues, we can extend the current architecture to a flexible and rich attention platform.
The key next step is to redesign the protocol to ensure that any kind of attention data can be stored. The types of attention data would need to be established and then each attention source can be paired with one or more attention vaults, again putting the user in charge of her data. Also, since attention data can be of different types, it might be beneficial to have different kinds of vaults. Some data would naturally lend to the choice of a relational database. At adaptiveblue we built the vault using Amazon S3, which I reviewed for Web 2.0 journal earlier.
Factoring in the services
So far the old and the new attention architecture has been focused on capturing and storing the user attention. These are of course important, but the least exciting aspects of the attention platform from the end user perspective. After all where are the end user benefits? The benefits must come from the plethora of services that analyze the user’s attention and do something interesting with it. Personalized recommendations, personalized alerts, personalized news filters, personalized search and personalized shopping are just a few exciting services that can be build on top the attention platform.
The user will sign up for a subset of these services and point them to her AttentionVault(s). The services will then utilize the user attention information and seamlessly plugin into various aspects of on-line and off-line life to deliver huge productivity boost and time savings. For this to happen, the attention vaults need to offer the standard access API in addition to the standard input API. The actual format and the protocol for the attention data should be the same as for storing the data in the vaults.
Conclusion
The recent explosion of quantity and types of information puts us on the very fast track to the attention economy. Now more than ever before it is critical to understand and harness the value of individual attention information. AttentionTrust organization is the forum for discussing attention issues from privacy, business and technical perspectives. To truly harness the value of the user’s attention, the players in attention space will need to work together and extend the existing implicit attention architecture to include wider variety of attention data and to create the standards-based infrastructure for attention services.
Reposting the discussion from Web2.0 journal site:
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Alex Iskold commented on the 20 Sep 2006:
I am very glad that you pored it out like this. The answer to your question is a firm ‘no’. In my point of view attention industry is not a scam but rather an opportunity to help people handle information in this overwhelming day and age. Specifically:
1) The data which is currently collected is not personalized, at least in most cases, so it is not relevant to you
2) You can care less what people do with your attention can not be true, you do not mean that. People do not want to be randomly watched, advertised to, etc.
3) Our main goal at adaptiveblue is to help you be more productive and to help you filter information, is that not a good goal?
4) Your response directly supports the fact that there is a big need for more education about the value of attention and personalization.
Alex
P.S. I am going to copy these comments on my blog to engage more people. Please feel free to continue here or there.
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AMADHA commented on the 20 Sep 2006:
Why do I think this is marketing? Look the concept of “attention” relates to time on web pages, bookmarks, etc. Well, duh. This information is already being captured, processed, analyzed, and sold on a daily basis… except much of it is called click through data. You touch my site, I grab what I can about your session and track you through my site. Various providers of “web promotional presentment” use tracking cookies to do similar things but in a more detailed and invasive way. It’s already being done, proprietary systems are already using and leveraging it.
My responding to this article is proof that I grant a certain level of “attention” to JDJ, as does my subscribing to the newsletter that brought me to it, and to obtain it JDJ or its publisher obtianed some personal information about me (name, email address). Attention is not an item subject to ownership, it is something freely granted or not. Identity, however, that is an item of ownership.
I care less about what you do with my attention information since when I give it, I’m receiving a perceived value in return. If on-the-other-hand you take my identity, or parts thereof, and sell it or abuse it I can sue you and I should.
I believe that the attention industry is a scam concept that is simply a rebranding of customer relationship management, CRM related issues, and it’s supporting architecture. After all, isn’t that what we’re really talking about?
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Alex Iskold commented on the 19 Sep 2006:
AMADHA,
Why do you think this is marketing? These are really early days of attention industry and we are need to think about standards and the architecture. Would you rather see proprietary platforms that capture leverage your data?
Alex
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Alex Iskold commented on the 19 Sep 2006:
Dan,
The users will own their data. They have to, otherwise things are not going to work. Part of AttentionTrust.org’s mission is to educate people about the value of their data. But it is important for all of us to think and speak out about it.
Alex
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Dan commented on the 19 Sep 2006:
1. Attention information is an interesting concept, but I doubt the users will get to own it, just like they don’t own their URL breadcrumbs.
2. You have several foreign-born writers with very good ideas. Would it be too much to review their English and add/remove the “the” were appropriate?
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AMADHA commented on the 19 Sep 2006:
Is it April 1st already? Man… you really had me there for a second, good one!
Oops. Its only September. Great marketing pitch! It really brings me back. Wow, I forgot how much I missed the .bomb 90′s.
alexiskold
September 20, 2006
Before I enter my final comments I would like to say that the premise of http://www.Adaptiveblue.com to help “you personalize your web experience based on what you already like” is admirable and for some probably very, if not extremely useful. I expect that there is a market for this, regrettably I’m not within that market (I like to many things to make exclusion useful) but I acknowledge that this market segment exists, and that it is probably quite large. I wish you and your company the greatest success.
I have embedded my comments within Alex’s last response and they are directed to him. They are as follows:
1) The data which is currently collected is not personalized, at least in most cases, so it is not relevant to you.
AMADHA: Yes, and in my opinion this is exactly how it should remain. Companies can use it to improve their Web presence and delivery of services to me through analysis of this data, my identity is safe and my Web experiences will improve from this process.
2) You can care less what people do with your attention can not be true, you do not mean that. People do not want to be randomly watched, advertised to, etc.
AMADHA: Yes I do, but perhaps I’m not being clear… let me try again. My attention to something is very different from something’s attention to me. Let me use this general statement as an example… Nobody likes to be watched, but everyone likes to watch. This statement is, as far as I have been able to tell, true. However it must also be noted that if there is a degree of anonymity or notoriety tied to being watched, then this social dynamic can change to the reverse. Further, random advertisements can serve as mechanisms to expand your list of likes/dislikes. So random ads are not necessarily bad, but they can be annoying. Regardless, my anonymity is preserved because random is random. The key to these examples, and others, is that I give my attention (time) to those things that pique my interest and deny it to those that don’t. Changing this dynamic in a manner that reduces anonymity (or randomness if you prefer) is, in my opinion, reducing the power of my attention as I become “one of the faithful” or “dependable” and not a new unknown opportunity for expansion. If I only accept content that I like, then my “attention” will become more valuable to companies selling things that conform to those likes since I will spend more time looking at or responding to the advertisments received which ‘capture’ my attention . Taken to an extreme, I will eventually end up reducing my “attention” to items that would have held it longer or I will be less productive since I will be more distracted from my core tasks by the higher interaction with all those things I like. So therefore by reducing randomness my “attention” increases in value but ends up losing power. (Which is important to you is your choice. I prefer the power of anonymity.) So yes, I don’t care what people do with my attention as long as they don’t know who I am or what I like, just that for this period of time they had it.
3) Our main goal at adaptiveblue is to help you be more productive and to help you filter information, is that not a good goal?
AMADHA> Absolutely.
4) Your response directly supports the fact that there is a big need for more education about the value of attention and personalization.
AMADHA> You’re probably right about both.
AMADHA
September 21, 2006
AMADHA,
Thanks for your comments, this is very useful and good discussion.
Alex
alexiskold
September 21, 2006
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