Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, October 3, 2006:
Gesture Who, Gesture What?
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.
Nick Bradbury points over to Steve Gillmor today and notes that Steve has been on a roll and points specifically to the article, ”No Prisoners” as being one of his best pieces in a long time. Citing it as “some of his most coherent posts in ages”. Now, I’ve tried to follow all this attention stuff (apparently now called Gestures?) and I’m sorry but I just don’t get it. I don’t see the revolution. The article linked above makes no sense at all to me, I find it barely readable. Perhaps if I understood the point of attention/gestures it would make sense?
So can anyone out there help me out with why my RSS reader tracking what I read is so cool? Is that all this really is? Doesn’t this system seem to wrongly equate attention with enjoyment? Help.....
Discussion
I had the same experience when I (tried to) read "No Prisoners". I felt like it was written during an acid trip which gave everything an overly heightened sense of importance.
I may go back and read the other articles as background, but not until this whole idea gets more attention (i.e. starts showing some staying power on techmeme).
Created by Andy Miller on 10.03.2006 4:57 pm
I can't tell what this article is supposed to be talking about. Having seen AttentionTrust present at a NY Tech meetup, apparently their idea is for you to voluntarily let them collect records about what you do online, and somehow they will let you use this information to your benefit. Their site is full of bombastic prose comparing your attention data to "rights" and "principles" and making it seem like some kind of political movement. I find their whole proposition highly dubious and disingenuous, and I'm not sure what real problem they solve, except for the problem of collecting more marketing data on people.
Created by Lee Semel on 10.03.2006 6:13 pm
I'm really glad to hear I'm not the only one who doesn't get it. I was starting to worry that there's some really obvious upside to this that I was just missing. Like you said Lee it seems to mostly be a way to collect iffy marketing data.
Created by Ian on 10.03.2006 6:51 pm
The obvious upside you're missing is for the marketer, who wants to collect as much data on who's paying attention to what, in order to buy or sell advertising more cost-effectively. That being said, I could see how *privately* collecting information about one's attention could be useful. For example, it would be informative to know what percent of time you spend in email versus working in a text editor, so you could be more conscious of how you use or misuse your time and adjust accordingly. Or another example, tracking which clients you're talking to or emailing the most. I definitely don't see the benefit of a 3rd party organization bent on collecting personal information.
Created by Lee Semel on 10.03.2006 7:07 pm
Look at this meeting notice...
http://www.attentiontrust.org/node/407
"In our post-industrial Web 2.0 world money is not the currency of choice". I suppose now can I pay the mortgage with attention instead of dollars.
Created by Lee Semel on 10.03.2006 7:09 pm
First of all it's Steve Gillmor, not Gillmore.
Steve is a journalist most recently with ZDNet and now working independently for Pod Show. Together with Seth Goldstein they have formed the Attention Trust.
In the nutshell the Attention Trust/Gesture Bank wants to serve as a clearinghouse for your reading habits/web statistics/attention data, letting you negotiate who, when and for how much companies can use your attention data.
In short the Attention Trust is trying to recognize and spread the message that:
1) There is value in attention data
2) Google/Yahoo/Microsoft shouldn't own, control and sell that data - you should!
HTH
Created by John Gunning on 10.03.2006 9:27 pm
Thanks I fixed the typo.
I know who he is, I sometimes listen to the gang and have posted about him in the past with one of his other off base ideas (g-apps replacing Office).
So, here's some questions I have given your points.
1. Why should I trust him(them) more than Google, Yahoo, MS? None of those 3 companies have ever done me wrong in terms of my personal information.
2. Who says there's value in that data? I can tell you that if all that's being done is seeing what feeds I'm subscribed to and which posts I click on they're a long way from having accurate data.
See the issue is I often get lots of good information from posts I spend a short time on and no information from posts which take and hour to read. I'm subscribed to many feeds I don't read. I have many apps open all day, though on many days I may not use several of those apps at all.
Isn't me actually asking for information or clicking a link much better validation that someone has my attention then my news reader trying to figure it out by guessing?
Created by Ian on 10.03.2006 9:38 pm
And responses:
1) The idea of AT is that they act as the stewards of your Attention Data, but the data remains yours. I imagine their business model would be to charge a small 'brokerage fee' as part of their service for acting as an agent for you in selling your attention data.
2) Alexa, Google, Yahoo, or a multitude of others with an inventory of ads that they wish to place.
Think about it: if advertisers have data on what you read and like and what you don't they can serve you more targeted and better converting ads can't they?
Take you as an example Ian, I'm sure that you would love to get ads in front of people who have recently been browsing Help Desk solutions wouldn't you?
HTH
Created by John Gunning on 10.03.2006 10:06 pm
Ah, but that's my point exactly! When someone actively searches Yahoo or Google there can be no doubt that they're looking for help desk software. They are taking an active step forward in looking for it. It's unlikely I'd ever know such a thing by their RSS feeds. What are the RSS feeds of someone looking for help desk software?
Now of course marketers would love to have this info. But that doesn't mean the info is actually accurate. I think it's accuracy is dubious at best with todays technology. So if it's not very accurate isn't it really just a sham so they can take a piece by acting the middle man and the marketers can show me the same ads I get on TV and search engines?
Where's the benefit for me? I think I once heard that they would pay me. I'm not sure if that's still on the table, but even so how much would it be? Unlikely to be enough to be worth my time and all the intrusion.
Not to mention that if tech folks don't get it hows the average Joe? Does this all just start to happen "automatically" for them as a "convenience"? Seems a lot more dangerous than the bigco's to me who at least only have me when I'm on their site, not around the clock.
Created by Ian on 10.03.2006 10:15 pm
Ian,
I share some of your reservations over AT, in particular the economics of what would probably be micro-payments for people's AT data. The logistics of routing all that AT data to a central point would be no walk in the park either.
However I must point out what I believe to be a common misconception about Attention:
Attention Data is not just data about what blog posts I read, but any 'gesture' across the entire spectrum of HTTP and possibly more.
In fact when viewed a certain way AT could be construed as a 'not-so-evil' version of Alexa/Gator.
Created by John Gunning on 10.03.2006 10:39 pm
Well if I can return to the original point of this, what the heck IS it? Do you have any links to clearly written material about it, specifics? Is this an actual proposal or just geeky hyperbole?
Created by Ian on 10.03.2006 10:54 pm
Not sure that there is a publicly available spec, but rather an implementation:
http://www.attentiontrust.org/ and
http://www.gesturebank.com (Beta) and
http://www.gesturelab.com
Created by John Gunning on 10.03.2006 11:00 pm
How is this different from what DoubleClick does already? They have a big network of sites, cookie you so they know what pages you are looking at, try to guess what topics you are interested in based on the content and serve appropriate ads.
They don't seem to do a very good job of serving anything appropriate by using this indirect approach, so I'm not sure how adding blog posts or other data to my dossier will help.
It's a big leap of faith to infer that because I read about some topic, that there's some product I want to buy that's directly correlated to it.
When I want to buy something, I serch on Google or Amazon, or go to a review site, and I'd say that's a much clearer indication of what products are worth pushing to me than what blogs or webpages I pay attention to.
Created by Lee Semel on 10.03.2006 11:07 pm
Heh, I still don't get it! The only place I can find anything that looks like a description is the principles section of attentiontrust.org
http://www.attentiontrust.org/about
Of course it's practically incomprehensible and really down right silly sounding.
It's also funny how we're not supposed to trust the bigco's and we should get control of what's "ours", but they're pushing you to download a FireFox extension which apparently tracks your movements. It's a little tricky to find details but here they are:
http://www.attentiontrust.org/extension/help
Here's some funny stuff from the page:
Q: What does the AttentionTrust Extension save and share?
A: For each web page you visit, the AttentionTrust Extension will save the web page's URL, the web page's title, the HTTP response code, and whether that web page read or wrote any cookies. (The contents of cookies are not recorded.) The Extension will also record a date and time stamp.
So it basically recreates the log file the website would already have on you. Apparently you can then send that information to "approved partners", though it's unclear how this benefits you.
So I'm thoroughly unimpressed. Is this truly it? Is it even LESS than I thought it was?
Created by Ian on 10.03.2006 11:19 pm
Oh, and I thought it actually gave you ads. But you have to send your logfile to an "approved partner" before you get the ads. I gave it too much credit.
Created by Lee Semel on 10.03.2006 11:26 pm
Lee,
not one is asking you to invest in it. I am in no way affiliated with Attention Trust and I certainly don't defend any business models that aren't my own.
You are entitled to hold any opinion you like about AT. I was just making a good faith effort to answer the blog post: What is this Attention stuff all about.
Created by John Gunning on 10.03.2006 11:44 pm
Thanks for your participation John. Sorry if I've come off hard on it. I just don't get it and anyone I've ever asked can never really give a straight answer about it. It's all kind of mystical.
Created by Ian on 10.03.2006 11:56 pm
You know Ian you and Steve Gillmor aren't that different - you both throw things out there to make people pay attention (pardon the pun).
Created by John Gunning on 10.04.2006 12:05 am
Heh, well it's been slow around here lately so I needed to spice it up! Next time I'll do it by talking in circles about a "big" idea 
Created by Ian on 10.04.2006 12:09 am
The writing and hype are acrid, but I think it's not just ads, and that he Gillmor should have deferred to his oddly construed XML DTD. Rather than deflating into text or trying the beta of Dragon Naturally Trying To Dissemble While Working The Bowflex.
The cool thing is that he's making automagical trust networks based on who's with who, neverminding how, and probably on course to agree with my gmail spam folder full of promises to increase gmail.com's rank with google and help me find less pricey null. The uncool thing is that it would give SomethingAwful.com enough credit to buy Singapore based on frozen cellphone sessions we left open. Look for the L3 DOM mediation item IsSlackjawed soon.
The trust thing could be cool; maybe cut my time on some surveys, tell me how bad some boring person really is, do some design tuneup for me, get competitive bids for lunch....
Created by Steve Nordquist on 10.15.2006 5:47 am