Woohoo!! One of the first 500 members of Attention Trust Darn it! One of the first 300’s… Watch that space, it will be something cool and big in the future. Darn it,! again, it is cool already, it will be huge in the future.
Attention is the substance of focus. It registers your interests by indicating choice for certain things and choice against other things. Any time you pay attention to something (and any time you ignore something), data is created. That data has value, but only if it’s gathered, measured, and analyzed. Right now, you generally lack the ability to capture that data for yourself, so you can’t benefit from it. But what if you could? And what if you could share your data with other people, who were also capturing their own data, or if you could exchange your data for something of value with companies and other institutions that were interested in learning more about the things that interested you? You’d be in control–you would decide who has access to what data, as well as what you’d accept in exchange for access to your data.
A layman’s explanation by PC4Media.
As we use the web, we reveal lots of information about ourselves by what we pay attention to. Imagine if all of that information could be stored in a nice neat little xml file. And when we travel around the web, we can optionally share it with websites or other people. We can make them pay for it, lease it, scream for it “show me the money”, barter for it, whatever. The important point is that we get to decide who has access to it, how long they have access to it, and what we want in return. And they have to tell us what they are going to do with our Attention data. But, the possibility of having all of that information within our control and being able to share it with anyone – is huge. It opens up the marketplace to anyone with the right product. It gives marketers the ability to plug into this data and serve us better. It gives new startups with clever algorithms the ability to bust out onto the scene.
Thanks to Mademe L for bringing that to my attention (no pun intended)