edbatista's blog

Helping AttentionTrust get off the ground has been a rewarding experience, and I'm proud that my efforts have assisted in the transformation of Seth Goldstein and Steve Gillmor's vision into reality. The results of these efforts include financial sponsorship from the Omidyar Network, a membership of over 800 supporters, more than 5,000 Attention Recorder downloads, and ongoing administrative support from the San Francisco Foundation. And over the past year, the concept of attention has become a central feature of discussions about the future of media, communication and the web itself, reflected in the 15,000 "attention" tags on del.icio.us and Technorati.

With these elements in place, I believe AttentionTrust is well-prepared for the future, and I've decided that it's the right time for me to transition out of my role as Executive Director in order to pursue my interests in executive coaching and change management consulting. Many thanks to everyone who's been involved with AttentionTrust, and I look forward to working alongside you in a new capacity!

Many of my duties are now being handled by Curtis Hougland and Cori Schlegel, who've been actively involved with AttentionTrust on a number of fronts over the past year. If you have any questions related to AttentionTrust, please contact Curtis or Cori directly. You can stay in touch with me through my personal site. Thanks again!

Ed Batista

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+data attention+economy

AOL's ill-considered decision to release 19 million search queries conducted by over 650,000 users from March through May of this year has broken out of the blogosphere into mainstream media outlets like CNN, the BBC, MarketWatch and WebProNews.

As far as I can tell, Greg Linden was the first person to point to the data set on AOL's research site, back on August 4th, and the comments on his post highlight the potential value of this attention data and AOL's slapdash approach to anonymization. For example, "Reto" commented:

I've now had a chance to spend 5mins browsing the data myself. There's a couple hundred examples of people pasting a phishing email into the search box, each email begins: 'Dear [user's *full* name]'.

I picked a name at random and was quickly able to see this guy lives in Ohio but is moving to Georgia, he drives a Chevy van (which he's looking to 'pimp'), he may have stomach cancer, he desperately wants to win the lottery -- and is considering enlarging his...

Ahh, in any case I know his full name and where he lives, combined with *very* personal details.

Adam D'Angelo at CalTech was also one of the first to assess and discuss the data set:

User 491577 searches for "florida cna pca lakeland tampa", "emt school training florida", "low calorie meals", "infant seat", and "fisher price roller blades". Among user 39509's hundreds of searches are: "ford 352", "oklahoma disciplined pastors", "oklahoma disciplined doctors", "home loans", and some other personally identifying and illegal stuff I'm going to leave out of here. Among user 545605's searches are "shore hills park mays landing nj", "frank william sindoni md", "ceramic ashtrays", "transfer money to china", and "capital gains on sale of house". Compared to some of the data, these examples are on the safe side. I'm leaving out the worst of it - searches for names of specific people, addresses, telephone numbers, illegal drugs, and more. There is no question that law enforcement, employers, or friends could figure out who some of these people are.

This is obviously bad news for AOL and worse news for AOL users whose privacy has been violated. But hopefully this episode will contribute to a broader understanding of attention data and encourage people to treat their personal data as a valuable resource.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+data attention+economy aol aol+research greg+linden adam+d'angelo

In my opinion this is some of the most significant news to date in the development of the attention economy (and thanks to Seth Goldstein for pointing it out to me.)

Last week Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, talked to financial analysts about the company's strategy as the technology industry shifts to a web services model, and he not only emphasized the importance of attention data in that strategy, but he also made reference to user control over that data. First Ozzie discussed Windows Live:

We know that a centralized service can be a great place to store or cache things so they can be accessed anywhere on the Net, and to organize things and share things with others.

So in our case, we consider what can be done for the user by assuming the presence of a new service infrastructure that does such things, a set of centralized services that in our case we call Windows Live. The services offered up by the Windows Live platform are available to Web sites and also to client applications and also to mobile applications. And this is key to our strategy. Because it's our aspiration to create seamless Web, desktop and mobile experiences for all activities relevant to users and customers in all our markets.

And our model for doing so is to use our Windows Live services platform as an experience hub, and to use the PC, the browser and mobile devices as different experience-delivery mechanisms for the value we aspire to deliver.

In other words, Microsoft is using Windows Live as a hub to bring it all together.

Later Ozzie noted the central role that attention data will play within Windows Live:

The Windows Live services platform serves three distinct roles. First, it makes it easier for developers both inside and outside of Microsoft to quickly and easily create open, interoperable, broad-scale Internet applications and services.

Second, its purpose is to observe and aggregate the behavioral activity of users in a manner respectful of their privacy, both to improve the user experience and to improve profitability. [Emphasis added]

And third, its purpose is to serve as a common back end for monetization supporting all three services' business models—advertising, subscriptions and transactions.

New applications & services + attention data = improved user experience & profitability. That's a fairly straightforward equation, but Ozzie went even further to emphasize the importance of attention data and of user control:

When talking about a platform in the classic sense, as in Windows or .NET, it's all too easy to focus almost exclusively on the infrastructure elements of that platform. After all, every development platform must have application frameworks and APIs and databases and the like. And the same, of course, is very much the case with this new type of platform. Windows Live's infrastructure services represent a very significant investment from a capital, operational and technical innovation perspective. It takes quite a bit of cleverness to economically serve hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

But beyond infrastructure services, what's most unique and valuable about a very large-scale services platform is what I'll refer to as optimization. By optimization I mean the monitoring and utilization of both collective end-user behavior and individual behavior to rank content for the user. [Emphasis added] That ranked content might be the order of advertisements in a search or e-mail window, or the order of relevant news items or playlists or video clips or items in a marketplace that are presented to the user.

We see the power of optimization every day in the relevancy of search engines and on Web sites such as Digg or Reddit and YouTube and Amazon.

Optimization always respectful of a user's privacy will be increasingly key to delivering great user experiences, and it's already a key factor in the area of profitability, because the larger the number of users that are connected to any services platform, the more behavioral the data that can be generated. The larger the number of PCs and other devices that are connected to that platform, the more behavioral data that's available; the larger the number of applications connected to the platform, both Web apps and desktop apps, the better our optimizations will be and the more profitable it will be for us and for our partners. [Emphasis added]

I don't think "privacy" fully encompasses the rights that users should have over their personal attention data, but it's a great start. (As an alternative, I'd humbly suggest AttentionTrust's founding principles.) And at the very least, Ozzie has made it clear that Microsoft is thinking extensively about 1) the value and utility of attention data, 2) the fundamental role it will play in a web services world, and 3) the importance of user control. That's pretty big news to me.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+data attention+economy microsoft ray+ozzie windows+live

WHAT: San Francisco Attention Meetup
WHERE: CNET, 235 Second Street, between Howard and Folsom
(Here's a map.)
WHEN: Tuesday, July 25th, 6-7pm

We'll have presentations from Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency and Pinko Marketing and David Marks of Loomia. Join our Meetup group to RSVP and get involved.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+data attention+economy attention+meetup cnet tara+hunt david+marks citizen+agency pinko+marketing loomia

Cori Schlegel (who provides technical support to AttentionTrust) commented on Josh Porter's post about social networks killing email, which sparked another post from Josh on A Messaging Proxy and Domain as Identity and some further discussion on federated identity, among other topics.

Cori's initial comment:

So, what we really need is a messaging proxy. I send an email to my daughter’s on-line identity, which forwards it in the form of a message to her (not-yet-existing) MySpace account. She replies, and my on-line identity forwards it to the IRC channel I’m in.

Combine context and presence with generic messaging. What a platform.

From Josh's post in response:

So yesterday we were talking about the problem that people in social networks have: when you’re active in social networks you are less active outside of them. You become immersed in them, so that when you’re in MySpace the people outside of MySpace get less of your Attention...

In the comments Cori Schlegel made the seemingly innocuous suggestion that we need a messaging proxy. Send a message to the proxy, and you get it on all of your devices or services that talk to your proxy.

This is a great idea! And the more that I thought about it, the more I realized that it is a perfect extension of an idea that I wrote about last year: domain as identity. (a post which, coincidentally enough, Cori commented on).

Here’s how it would work, as far as I understand it...

Instead of web sites having domain names, and those domains having mail accounts, people have domain names and one messaging account. My domain is Bokardo, and I have services at Bokardo.com that I control. Mail would be one of those services.

When mail is sent to mail.bokardo.com, it is forwarded to any devices or services I have added to my domain. So it acts as a proxy in this way...it serves as the place that all mail is sent to, and then I control where it goes after that...

Instead of having a separate messaging service for each context we’re in, we have a single messaging service provided by our own domain that routes messages for us. If we join a new social network, we still use our messaging proxy to relay the messages...

Attention-minded folks might see this idea as personal attention streams. Route messages through a single service, and you’ve got them all right there for picking. You’ve got a single address book comprised of everyone you’ve ever sent a message to, you know where you’ve spent your attention, and that could potentially be valuable information for oneself (and perhaps for others).

From Cori's follow-up in the comments:

I didn’t mean the comment all that innocuously, actually. Your post sparked something that seemed really important, and you’ve built that out to a solid ideological framework.

I like the idea a lot. A little of something for everyone. Federated identity, federated messaging, federated attention, federated presence. Some of the bits are already out there; SuprGlu has pieces of it, some people use GMail to cover other aspects. Placing it all under a domain and connecting it all together are the obvious missing pieces.

I'm still driving around the East Coast on vacation and at the moment am rushing to get out the door for the next leg of the trip, so I can't take the time to comment further here. But I think Josh and Cori have touched on some very significant topics, and I'm looking forward to thinking about them in greater depth.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+economy attention+data josh+porter cori+schlegel

Susan Whiting, CEO of Nielsen Media Research (which recently unveiled plans for Anywhere Anytime Media Measurement) is interviewed in today's Wall Street Journal, and the piece raises some interesting questions about the continued relevance of Neilsen's basic attention data:

There is an increasing sense in the ad business that the more valuable measures are those that tell marketers and media outlets not how many people saw an ad, but what subset of that larger group remembers and recalls that ad and even goes out and makes a purchase because of it. In that light, are Nielsen's best-known measures--traditional TV ratings--as useful as they were in the past?

Ms. Whiting: Of course, people are using other ways of valuing advertising, and I think that these are complementary, but the baseline has to be an understanding of who is receiving the television program and the commercials, and how that audience is changing... As you see media fragmenting and you see advertisers looking for more accountability in how they are spending money, I think they really need a good understanding of how to reach consumers, and we measure independently the value of the demographics of those audiences. As they are changing very quickly and our measuring changes with them, that independent third-party accountability of an audience, I think, it is even more important. We have been working directly with some very major advertisers and an advertisor advisory council I put together. They have told us we need to keep doing what we are doing with even more quality and precision, because they need that assurance that they can measure the value of that television audience...

Whiting's comments left me feeling that Nielsen is certainly "focused on doing what we are doing with more quality and precision," but also with a sense that there's something missing from this model. It's not the platform--Nielsen is obviously looking well beyond TV and outside the home into other media on other devices.

But systems focused on helping marketers make the next leap in behavioral targeting just aren't that compelling now that we're talking about entirely new ways to connect users with information and consumers with the marketplace. The only way to truly track people "anytime, anywhere" is to enable them to do it for themselves and empower them to control their own data and put itto use for their own purposes.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+data attention+economy nielsen netratings nielsen+media+research anywhere+anytime+media+measurement susan+whiting

In today's Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg and Katy Boehret review the Nike + iPod Sport Kit, which Noah Brier tagged as an incognito attention system two months ago.

What I found most interesting in their article was 1) the fact that the motion sensor that's designed to be inserted in specially designed Nikes can actually be attached to any shoe and used effectively, and 2) there's modest social networking component to the whole system:

After our workouts, we each plugged our Nanos in and loaded their data onto NikePlus.com. Here, our most recent run or walk was diagrammed in a graph... A leaderboard lists the best times around the country, and this can be narrowed down according to gender, age and geography...

You can challenge friends to see who can run the fastest, longest, or themost miles; this challenge is emailed to your friends using NikePlus.com.

The obvious next step: Allow users to mix and match (and control) their NikePod geo and fitness data, creating any number of discovery, recommendation and social networking opportunities: What are the best/most popular/hardest routes in my area? What new routes could I try on vacation? Who else runs my routes, or routes similar to mine? Etc.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+economy attention+data noah+brier ipod nike nikeplus nikepod

Paul Watson has a handy tip for anyone who's running our Attention Recorder on multiple machines and needs to synch domain blacklists:

[Open] your Firefox prefs.js file and [find] the line that starts like so; user_pref(”attention.blackListDomains”. You can take the value of that and copy it into the other key/value pair that starts with; user_pref(”gesturebank.blackListDomains”.

Thanks, Paul!

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+economy attention+data paul+watson

Fred Wilson has added some new bling to his blog, including Root "Worms" (powered by our Attention Recorder) that display his most recent Yahoo and Google searches as well as the sites he visits most frequently. I'm running the former on my site as well, and although I'm not a fan of the, uh, product name, I think these little widgets are great ways to help people visualize attention data. (Standard disclosure: Seth Goldstein is a co-founder of AttentionTrust, the chair of our Board, and the CEO of Root.)

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+economy attention+data fred+wilson