Add new comment

My dialogue with the stealthy yapaZOO on the importance of context continues:

Looking at clicks just tells you what someone has paid attention to in the past. In order to make sense of it, you need to know why they paid attention to it, and even more importantly, how much they valued the experience. In other words, to borrow John Hagel’s expression (not sure if John coined it or borrowed it from somewhere else), you need to know their Return on Attention.

In a stable environment, you can figure out the Why and the ROA through analysis of a large enough set of clickstream data. If someone returns to a source often, it is likely it provides them with a high Return on Attention. If someone buys coffee at Starbucks every day, it is safe to infer that they like Starbucks.

The vast majority of environments, however, are not stable... [Y]ou can see patterns, but with no understanding of the context changes, it is very difficult to provide recommendations that increase your Return on Attention.

(This is one of my big frustrations with the Amazon recommendation system, by the way - a little while ago, I was shopping for a present for my 3 yr old niece - no occasion, just a random present. I bought one from Amazon. Ever since then, I have been getting recommendations about other kids books, videos, toys, etc, even though I have relatively little ongoing interest. This only stopped when I went in to my ratings and history and provided Amazon with more context - specifically, that I wasn’t interested in those items).

This is where Steve Gillmor's repeated emphasis on the importance of inattention, which highlights what we ignore, is crucial. A more sophisticated system than Amazon's would note that yapaZOO subsequently ignored children's gifts and would integrate this inattention data into its recommendation without requiring yapaZOO's manual intervention.

As I noted earlier, I agree that context is essential if attention data is to have meaning. But it's still unclear how yapaZOO would provide context to fill in the Why and Return On Attention blanks. Opportunities for users to answer these questions explicitly will provide context, but will they also create confusion and open the door to attempts to game the system?

No worries about the anonymity, yapa--I certainly understand But when you're ready to share, I'll look forward to hearing more.

tags: attention attentiontrust