Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

Nick Bradbury blogs about AttentionTrust.org:

Last week saw the launch of AttentionTrust.org, a non-profit hatched by Seth Goldstein, Steve Gillmor and Hank Barry which is “dedicated to promoting the basic rights of attention owners.” I’m honored to be serving on the initial board of AttentionTrust.org, along with Dick Costolo and Clay Shirky.

I’ve written about attention before, but I realize it remains a nebulous concept to many folks. I think part of the problem is that those of us who write about attention tend to be talking to people who already understand the concept, so I’ll write this on the assumption that you have no idea what I’m talking about.

The recent push towards open attention is great. The data here is important. A great many services are currently being built on top of attention yet they aren’t interoperable.

For example the attention data within Friendster could be used within a lot of really interesting applications. The problem is that you can’t get at the data. Linked In has the same issue. So do many other services.

The problem is that it’s your data. These big companies are being built on top of your personal information. For example the recent My Space purchase by Fox for $590 million is largely attributed to their database. It can’t be for the software! Lord knows it can’t be decent code.

The big problem as I see it right now is that these companies just have too much incentive to keep the data private. If it’s the choice between doing the right thing and making a few hundred million I think we can all predict what the outcome would be. Put yourself in their situation. You’d probably do the same thing.

I think this is where AttentionTrust can come in though. If we can build applications that use attention data and create a strong consumer demand then they might not be able to maintain their data islands anymore.

The Blogosphere is a great example. There’s attention data here. It’s all about links and feeds! Take a look at Technorati, Feedster, Rojo, Bloglines, etc. All of these services exist because of open data.

Technorati, Feedster, Icerocket, etc are all competitors yet at the same time they can index the same data. This is because the blogosphere is open.

The way I see it there are main three reasons why some attention data is currently private (or will continue to be in the future).

1. Money – Companies like Friendster have too much of an advantage in keeping their data private. We need to change this by showing them that there are advantages to keeping it open.
2. Privacy – There are legitimate privacy concerns about some attention data being published. For example the guys at Moskuki are nervous about publishing the attention information within people’s calendars because there are privacy issues involved. You don’t everyone in the world (burglars) to know that you’re going to be out of the house at a concert on a certain day.
3. Engineering resources – The organization who you’d like to see publish attention data just doesn’t have the engineering resources to make this happen. For example I contacted Craig Newmark last week to get the attention data for email replies. I wanted to run some analysis on the data to find peek keyword to reply rates. They just don’t have the resources to give me the data though. Their current engineers are swamped.

I’m sure there are more issues here. If you can think of any more please leave a comment.

UPDATE: Some people have reservations.

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