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From Microsoft's Eric Richards' Gnomedex summary:

• Microsoft should commit to any data being manipulated by Microsoft properties having straight-forward, documented APIs for getting the data in and getting the data out. ..
• Microsoft sites and applications that can track usage patterns of what a user is doing should data mine this information, in a trusted and secure way, for the user, combining it across all the different computers that the user my log in to, and aggregate this data into useful information to re-enforce the user's memory and to provide serendipity in finding related quality information.

The first point is a step toward AttentionTrust's founding principles, which assert (among other things) that users should be able to store the personal attention data they create where they want and move it when they want. Although it should be noted that APIs are a crucial but not-necessarily-sufficient step. Allowing me to get my data out is great--but what if I want to delete it entirely?

And the second point suggests one of the ways that I believe attention data is going to prove most useful--powering personalized discovery and recommendation systems.

Eric discusses attention even more explicitly later in the post--it's interesting reading, so I'm going to quote this passage in full:

Attention: so I do recommend reading the following short paper: The Attention Economy The Natural Economy of the Net - this is a good paper to reflect upon given that it helps you understand sites like Memorandum and how they are doing a temporal aggregation of what people are writing about and linking to and rolling that up as a moment of: "Hey, this is what people are currently paying attention to."

Attention, in today's society, is power. The economy aspect of it, though, it what causes people to stumble as they ask, "How do I turn attention into money?" Well, how does a famous person turn attention into money?

As for the geekier aspects of attention, I've tried to conjure up a deeper understanding of Attention before: Eric'o'theque! Attention! After the first day of Gnomedex6, I wrote some unfortunate things regarding Mr. Gillmor's Attention Operating System talk, but it still escapes me, excepting the above paper, what's so super and beyond the obvious related to attention. It seems like simple data mining, like what Amazon does for each customer, and what attention strives to do is empower the user to data mine themselves and, if they choose, anonymize and share their attention so that an aggregate set of web-space sites can be unioned together to see what people in general are paying attention to.

As for Microsoft? Eh. Well, it would be useful if Sharepoint could create a page representing the sites and subsites that I have been visiting and using. What forms do I frequently fill out? What lists do I tend to edit? Digital bread crumbs aggregated over time and use. Then, I guess, knowing my organization, they could find associated sites within my reports, my peers, and my management (should my boss be on vacation and I need to fill out a report my boss usually does once a week). There shouldn't be any privacy concerns there since I'd only see information I have access to.

For Internet Explorer: should there be a way to do a more indepth history feature? Something I could push-up and push-down between the four different computers I use during the day would be nice. Call it "Live History" - oh yes, enjoy the oxymoron! - and provide a rich web page experience where I can review and organize where I spend my digital time, merged across participating devices. The most important thing is that I can let it roam, keep it updated, and access it from any computer. This would be something beyond the hierarchy of OPML.

Online life is exceptionally chaotic and a lot of data tracking a person's usage is collected. Perhaps there is something to the poor person bouncing around everywhere to opting in to having what they pay attention to collected and data mined and repurposed for themselves. And that's probably all fine and good until the lawyers get involved. Fine. Be sure to encrypt it.

I read much of this section as sypathetic to AttentionTrust principles and mission, but I'm unclear on that last passage: "...Perhaps there is something to the poor person bouncing around everywhere to opting in to having what they pay attention to collected and data mined and repurposed for themselves. And that's probably all fine and good until the lawyers get involved..." Is there a missing word in here? I'm just not getting Eric's meaning.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+economy attention+data eric+richards gnomedex