yapaZOO on Context

yapaZOO thinks I missed something in today's post on Liz Lawley at Syndicate:

Hinted at in this entry is the concept of context. You want to know not only WHAT someone is reading, you want to know WHY someone is reading it and how much they LIKED it. In other words, you want to know a) was this worthy of their attention?; and b) did they get a good Return on Attention?

Simply capturing clickstreams cannot give you the context. But to make the concept of Attention Filters practical, we need to get to that level. Data without context doesn’t have meaning.

I can't argue with the overall premise, or the conclusion. Context is essential if attention data is to have any meaning. This very topic came up in a discussion with Liz after her Syndicate session. To paraphrase her remarks, our online activity two weeks before Christmas obviously isn't representative of our activity throughout the year. Without the context that December 25th is a unique orgy of consumption throughout the Western world, an attention service looking at my data for the month would probably grossly mismeasure a) my annual income and b) my interest in flower arrangements (for my grandmother), 19th century fiction (for my wife), and tongue-shriveling Barolos (for my Dad.)

But how will the coming attention services effectively determine context? Will they ask for explicit references from the user to amplify the intentions implicit in their clickstream and other data? Although in some circumstances that might make sense, such as switching from a "public persona" to a "private persona," in general that seems like a poor solution to me, potentially muddying the waters and giving us less insight, not more, into what's really capturing our attention.

I'm also not ready to concede that context can't be wrung from clickstreams and other attention data. Sure, if you take Dec 1st-24th as your sample, you're going to draw the wrong conclusions. But look at enough data over a sufficient period of time, and I suspect it will be possible to make some very accurate assumptions about context, without requiring the user to make an additional explicit reference. How much data? How much time? No idea--that's something the smart guys will have to figure out.

My guesses may have nothing to do with yapaZOO's actual (unstated) solution to the problem of context. I'm looking forward to hearing more. yapa?