I’m intruiged by Seth Goldstein’s Root.net, the first commercial application of the Attention Trust platform (see my Attention Trust posts here and here).

Seth wrote a lengthy and descriptive post outlining the service for all participants on Transparent Bundles. The core service leverages the Attention Trust Recorder, which can be installed by an internet user (currently firefox only). Root.net calls users “consumers”.

The recorder tracks everything you do with your browser (it can be turned off at will, and root.net allows deletion of data you’ve recorded that you want to remove).

As a consumer you get two primary benefits – the ability to see your own data (see screen shot), and the ability to trade your data to other parties for some benefit – like more targeted advertising that you will actually find useful. This is something John Battelle writes about extensively in his book, by the way.

Publishers can also use the root.net system to generate leads, which can be sold to advertisers. Root.net also has anticipated arbitrage players, which they call “investors”, who will purchase leads from publishers and sell them to advertisers. The goal, of course, is to create a more liquid market.

I understand at least part of how it is intended to work. An internet user clicks on an ad and fills out a form, becoming a lead that is owned by the publisher. These leads can be sold to advertisers and investors in a liquid market

This is a big idea. It will take a lot of pushing to get it off the ground, but if it works it will redefine online advertising and lead generation.

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:

1. companies agree to principles (users own their own data and attention)
2. consumers download recorder (firefox extension) that tracks clickstream
3. recorder can be turned on or off at any time
4. consumers may share data with any or no approved companies
5. companies will incentivize users to share data

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.

AttentionTrust (TechCrunch Profile) has started to approve websites, and Steve was nice enough to send our’s today.

Your application for the AttentionTrust has been accepted. Your name will now appear on the list of supporters on www.attentiontrust.org. Please use the HTML code below to display the AttentionTrust badge on your site.

——————————————————————————-

——————————————————————————-

Thank you,
Steve Gillmor, President
AttentionTrust.org

As we’ve said, we continue to look forward to, and supporting, developments around the Attention idea.

Update: See Stowe Boyd’s “AttentionTrust.org: I Am A Card-Carrying Member Of A Subversive Movement“

Update: For an excellent writeup of Attention Trust, see Seth Goldstein’s essay here.

Company: AttentionTrust

Launched: Today (I believe)

What is it?

Attention Trust is a project led by Steve Gillmor and others that is the next evolution of his Attention idea. It is a “A non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the basic rights of attention owners”.

From a post by Steve Gillmor on March 28, 2005:

“What does matter is a pool of attention metadata owned by the users. This open cloud of reputational presence and authority can be mined by each group of constituents. Users can barter their attention in return for access to full content, membership priviliges, and incentives for strategic content. Vendors can build on top of that cloud of data with their own special sauce–the newbie crowd of MyYahoo, the pacesetter early adopters of Diller/Ask/Bloglines, the social attention farm of RoJo, and Google’s emerging Office service components orchestrated by the core GMail inforouter. And the media, which now includes publishers, analysts, researches, rating services, advertisers, sponsors, and underwriters, can use the data as a giant inference engine for leveraging the fat middle of the long tail.” Link

So what is AttentionTrust? It’s light on content for now, but it proposes a basic set of user rights to their attention data:

The idea of attention is hugely debated and polarized. It’s useful and needed, but will it work in the real world? The debate will continue as Steve pushes this idea forward.

We’ve joined AttentionTrust, and look forward to developments.

Additional Links/Research:

AttentionTrust, Steve Gillmor, Danny Ayers, Read/Write Web, O’Reilly Radar, Ted Leung, John Hagel, Jeff Clavier, Rough Type, New Persuasion, Corante, Got Ads?, Fiver Stone, pc4media, Ed Batista, Elizabeth Albrycht

Tags: attention, attention.xml, attentiontrust, techcrunch, web2.0