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20 March 2007
Putting attention to work
Posted by Paul Miller at March 20, 2007 10:54 PM
I've blogged about 'attention' several times here, on Panlibus, and elsewhere, stressing more than once the critical importance both of freeing our attention data (cf the Attention Trust), and of finding ways to put that clickstream - that Database of Intentions - to work.
Sam Sethi posted to Vecosys today, drawing my attention (no pun intended) to an attention-related group of which I had been unaware; the APML working group.
As their website states;
“APML will allow users to export and use their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows them to export their reading lists from Feed Readers.
The idea is to boil down all forms of Attention Data – including Browser History, OPML, Attention.XML, Email etc – to a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests.”
...
“The APML Workgroup is tasked with converting the current specification into an agreed standard. We invite all the players in or around the 'Attention Economy' to join us in realizing APML.”
I don't know - yet - if APML is the answer, but I do know that there is space for a straightforward means of capturing and expressing the ways in which I allocate my attention... and associating this with my intention at the time. Capturing the clickstream is a start, but the real value comes as we gain the ability to associate the resources on which I spend time with the context in which I was operating, and to differentiate my (probably) quite different behaviours as I search for work-related resources, family holidays and birthday presents.
It's one thing to be able to export my purchasing history from Amazon and share it with Borders. It's something else entirely - and something profoundly more empowering - to be able to aggregate my behaviour across a range of applications and to make meaningful use of that knowledge in improving my experience of those applications and of others as yet unvisited.
Given an aggregate view onto the combined usage of a set of services by myself and others, how might we mine that dataset in order to build something better? How much do we need to know, from how many people, over how long a period, to deliver something fundamentally different?
Of course, I very much doubt that the vast majority of users will wish to be bothered with logging their own attention. How might we, instead, make it straightforward for one of those users to request that a site in which they have invested their attention share relevant data with a competitor? How might the company of which I am an employee, the council to which I am a (council) tax payer, or the institution at which I am a student gain appropriate access to that data, and use it to enrich my experience and the experiences of my peers?
Is APML a step along that path? I look forward to finding out.
Today's CC-licensed image from Flickr is by the hollabackbackers, with a link far less obtuse than our usual!
Technorati Tags: attention, AttentionTrust, APML, Talis, Talis Platform, Vecosys, Web 3.0
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