If you are paying attention to me right now then that attention is worth something. And here I was thinking I was surfing the web and following my own interests? And that you were doing the same thing!
The idea of the Attention Trust is to propose that your attention has intrinsic value and that value should be acknowledged.
Eyeballs are everything in a world where 50,000 new blog posts are made every hour - see Technorati http://technorati.com/weblog/2006/04/96.html for plenty of amazing stats on blog usage.
The Attention Trust at http://www.attentiontrust.org/ has a Mozilla Firefox plug in that enables you to track your attention, save it as a text file then provide it to… not sure who I’d provide it to, but it would be interesting to know where I spend my time.
There’s the add-on idea of federated attention http://www.attentiontrust.org/node/392. This would take the hassle out of having multiple email addresses, social networking accounts and multiple hardware devices. The idea of federated attention would mean that the individual user becomes the centre of their world through a proxy domain that sends their communications to all the devices and services that they access. At least I think that’s what they’re getting at.
This idea would reduce the fragmentation that exists at the moment when one moves between (for example) a myspace account, an ICQ account, a work email and a mobile and laptop. If everything was connected - through the one proxy based on my individual identity - then the feeling of web-based multiple personality disorder subsides.
That’s got to be good.
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[…] Jen recently blogged about AttentionTrust and made the same mistake that most people make when they decide that is must be a good idea. […]
[…] I have talked elsewhere about the value that paying attention can have in an online environment, where getting eyeballs to a screen, and clickthroughs can be key performance indicators for an individual or a business. […]
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