I’m sitting in the Attention Trust public board meeting at the Web 2.0 conference and getting more details on their announcements discussed below.
Everything is centered around the Attention Trust Recorder Firefox extension (they’re calling it ATX). Once installed, if you turn it on, it monitors your click stream. ATX also tells you if the site you are on is Attention Trust approved, and has controls to turn the recorder on and off.
The data can be stored locally and/or shared with any number of trusted parties if you so choose. Attention Trust insists that companies using the data adhere to the Attention Trust principles.
This information is incredibly valuable, of course, particularly when aggregated with others. Virtually any online company will be interested in this data, and will invent creative ways to incentivize customers to share their attention data with them.
Search engines are the obvious example…knowing what sitex you’ve been to, and how long you’ve stayed, is extraordinarily useful in creating more relevant search results.
So once again, the basic flow:
- companies agree to principles (users own their own data and attention)
- consumers download recorder (firefox extension) that tracks clickstream
- recorder can be turned on or off at any time
- consumers may share data with any or no approved companies
- companies will incentivize users to share data
At last they had my attention all summer and were close to losing my attention due to inactivity.
The clickstream file attention_log.txt is not very useful. It neither measures frequency or time on a visit just url, cookie details etc. Delicious offers a better attention meta stream as the more people that tag a url/topic then more likely it is I need to read it. I am hoping companies like Attensa, Outfox and others use the ATX file combined with my OPML file + Tags to make this work.
The concept is great but it is early doors. I need am looking at Federated Trust, P3P, Polices, Meta Data Directories and Microsoft’s Infocard initiative.