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October 5, 2005

Attention Trust Recorder

Michael Arrington

13 comments »

AttentionTrust (profile) announced a number of updates to its service today.

The underlying philosophy of this nonprofit corporation is described in Seth GoldStein and Greg Yardley’s post on the Attention Trust blog.

In addition to a new look and feel to the site, AttentionTrust has also releaseed the Attention Trust Recorder, a Firefox extension that records your browsing history and saves it both to your desktop and to the Attention Trust service, where you can choose to share parts of it with trusted service providers.

From the FAQs:

Q: What does the Attention Recorder save and share?

A: For each web page you visit, the Attention Recorder 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 to were cookies. (The contents of those cookies we don’t record.)

You can see exactly what the Attention Recorder sends by selecting Tools > Attention Recorder Options, selecting the Approved Services tab, and then selecting ‘Local Storage’ as an Attention Service. The same information the Attention Recorder sends will then be written to your hard drive. For a more technical discussion of the Attention Recorder, see http://www.attentiontrust.org/extension/spec.


Q: How do I select which Approved Services to send my information to?

A: Your initial selection can be made from this page - by selecting an Approved Service from the list and downloading the extension from that Approved Service’s Attention Trust page, you’ll automatically begin sending your information to that service. In the future, you can edit which Attention Banks receive your information by going to Tools > Attention Recorder Options, selecting the Approved Services tab, and then changing your selections.

Steve Gillmor will be talking more about Attention Trust today at a 1:30 Web 2.0 Conference session. Updates then.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 5th, 2005 at 11:07 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

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Comments

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  1. Nick

    October 5th, 2005 at 11:22 am

    Maybe I’m just dense or something, but I’m still having a hard time grasping this concept of “Attention Trust”. I’ve heard people talk about this concept, I’ve done some reading on the site, but I’m still not getting it. I’m wondering if somebody out there can possibly explain this concept in simple terms or something.

  2. DEM

    October 5th, 2005 at 12:56 pm

    If feel exactly the same. I somehow sense this may be something important and interesting - but I can´t grasp it!

  3. Michael Arrington

    October 5th, 2005 at 1:51 pm

    I’m going to post another piece on what they are doing in much more detail. Best way to start is to read the blog post linked in the second paragraph above, then read the other post I am writing now.

  4. Paul Montgomery

    October 5th, 2005 at 8:58 pm

    I read that blog post, and apart from a cringefully ill-advised comparison to the Holocaust, it was a reasonably straightforward explanation of what they’re about.

    In short, the concept is that instead of waiting for spyware to capture your clickstream, you capture it yourself. The benefits as described in the article are too high-falutin’ to be realistic, but presumably in the real world, the main benefit of ATX will be to sell what is effectively your CRM data to big companies. If you like analogies, this of it as volunteering to be part of a paid consumer focus group. Or if you like more cynical analogies, think of it as being a lab chimp…

    The first thing that struck me was that the concept is very libertarian in nature, and thus will probably not catch on with the wider public. The psychology of privacy presents a lot of problems: people don’t like to think they’re being watched, and presenting a program in which they consent to being watched all the time is anathema to most unless they’re being handsomely paid (as in focus groups). This is particularly true for those who only surf the Web for fun, as they don’t want to concern themselves with anything that doesn’t sound like fun.

    Another obstacle relates to the argument about carrying your personalisations across different service providers is that many people like having different personae, and don’t want to be defined as one single entity. The persona they project to a single parent support group will be different to the persona they project at a computer games forum, and different again to the one they present at a P2P porn-sharing message board. If ATX can accomodate different personae for a single person, that might help drag more people in.

  5. Ed Batista

    October 6th, 2005 at 11:54 am

    Hi Michael,
    I’m the Executive Director of AttentionTrust (AT). Thanks for the post–looking forward to your next one.

    Great issues raised in the comments above. I agree that AT site is somewhat vague. That’s partly unintentional, and I expect to clarify the language on the site as we move forward. But it’s also partly by design, because we’re fully aware that we don’t have all the answers, and we want people with creative ideas to get involved with AT and help us fill in the blanks.

  6. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    October 6th, 2005 at 2:14 pm

    I’d like to see the referring page of each page I visit too, though maybe that’ll be obvious. And maybe the number of people who have bookmarked each page in various social bookmarking services. I presume my attention profile will be searchable?

    For what it’s worth, I think Ed Batista seems like a really cool guy. Just from reading his blog I feel a lot better about him being the ED of this group than if it had nefarious corporate backing. But maybe that’s a nefarious corporate coverup. I don’t think so, though.

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