Bart Stevens recently suggested a breakdown on the potential economic impact of VRM, based largely on a post by Steve Rubel arguing that $1B is wasted in online advertising today.

First, I anticipate the Personal Datastore to become a design pattern that underlies other VRM services, rather than a service by itself. In fact, a PD isn’t really a PD unless it enables VRM services explicitly… Personal Datastores aren’t just online storage like Amazon’s S3.

Second, I think the $1 Billion number is far too small. Steve is only estimating the CPM costs for display ads that are literally missed by users during eye tracking studies. That’s an intriguing number because those ads truly are wasted… there isn’t even any brand exposure because the ads are not even seen. It’s like paying for ads in a magazine that is never opened by a real reader.

On the other hand, there are still plenty of ads that are seen by the wrong people and CPC ads that are clicked on by the wrong people. Note that for the “right” people, those ads arguably generate useful brand exposure, so they aren’t wasted.

When advertising starts with the advertiser, it inherently wastes money, as it inevitably buys placement in ineffective or misaligned media. By now it is an old chestnut that advertisers waste half their budget–they just don’t know which half. Sometimes advertising is an investment in exploring potential markets… the goal is the data gained in the test marketing, which isn’t entirely a waste. Other times advertising is educational outreach where the goal isn’t so much to trigger a sale, but instead to introduce people to new products and services. Sometimes this is called demand generation. And that still leaves a vast amount of waste, buying media (offline or online) that just doesn’t perform or create any value. The potential savings in these areas is not only missing from Rubel’s analysis, I’d wager it is far more than $1 billion.

The huge potential of VRM is to turn these models inside-out, by providing a scalable pipeline directly into the product development and sales divisions of capable firms. Instead of Vendors guessing what people want, VRM services can cost-effectively tell Vendors what people truly do want. If the product is available, the sales team can enable purchase and delivery. If the product doesn’t exist, the Vendor can create it if demand is sufficient.

This new paradigm is exactly the shift from Attention to Intention that Doc and I have been advocating. The Attention game is the world of traditional advertising, where the industrial manufacturer competes in mass media to get the attention of the right consumers in order to generate demand for their products and services. Given that attention, they seduce, cajole, and entertain in hopes of winning new sales.

The Intention game, on the other hand, starts with explicit requests from the user to fulfill actual demand. Sometimes that intention will be nascent, needing further exploration and discovery. But eventually, for the segment of the population that finds something they want or need, that intention shifts from educating oneself about available options to seeking specific satisfaction, that is, buying a solution. Because intention starts with the user’s commitment to take the relationship to the next level, it immediately takes a vast amount of guesswork and wasted advertising out of the equation.

This guesswork and wasted advertising is probably closer to $100 billion/year, but that’s just my gut feeling. And that number only addresses the loss side of the equation, that is, the money we save by not wasting product development and advertising dollars. It ignores the value of products and services that today languish as innumerable missed opportunities–missed because companies have no way to efficiently gauge true market demand. There are undoubtedly services and products that exist–or could be profitably offered today–which fail to reach customers because we don’t have a suitable mechanism for connecting the right customers with the right companies. This potential to close the gap between potential sales and unmet demand, is simply too large to estimate.

The Cost-Per-Action/Pay-for-Performance business model of Affiliate Marketing is likely to continue to transform the ad industry, significantly reducing billions in unnecessary expenses, including the $1B wasted on unseen display ads in Rubel’s analysis.

It won’t be until we transform explicit intent into new offerings and new sales that we unleash the vast potential that is VRM.

Kudos to Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky in the NY State Assembly for taking on GoogleClick and the rest of the back-end invisible online tracking services.

The NYT reports A Push to Limit the Tracking of Web Surfers’ Clicks:

AFTER reading about how Internet companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo collect information about people online and use it for targeted advertising, one New York assemblyman said there ought to be a law.

 

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, the sponsor of a New York bill to limit how companies collect data on computer users.

So he drafted a bill, now gathering support in Albany, that would make it a crime — punishable by a fine to be determined — for certain Web companies to use personal information about consumers for advertising without their consent.

And because it would be extraordinarily difficult for the companies that collect such data to adhere to stricter rules for people in New York alone, these companies would probably have to adjust their rules everywhere, effectively turning the New York legislation into national law.

“Should these companies be able to sell or use what’s essentially private data without permission? The easy answer is absolutely not,” said the assemblyman who sponsored the bill, Richard L. Brodsky, a Democrat who has represented part of Westchester County since 1982.

…

“A law like this essentially takes some of the gold away from marketers,” said Joseph Turow, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. “But it’s the right thing to do. Consumers have no idea how much information is being collected about them, and the advertising industry should have to deal with that.”

This is an absolute no brainer.

If you don’t have permission, don’t track users.

In the physical world, we have developed fairly robust rules of social etiquette and even laws regulating this sort of behavior. Can you imagine how creepy it would be if some stranger surreptitiously followed you around, noting where you go, what products you buy, even what sections in the supermarket you lingered in? Yech! Get that stalker away from me.

And yet, that is exactly what most (if not all) online ad networks do to maximize their ability to sell high margin ads targeting Internet users. It makes sense. If they can tell from your clickstream behavior that you are likely looking for a new car, then they can create a lot of value by showing you new car ads. Value for advertisers and value for you… after all, you ARE in the market for a new car, right?

When it works, it’s cool. But what about when you don’t want it working? When you want a little discretion as you window shop? When you’d like some privacy? Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Users can’t tell when the ad networks are, or are not, tracking–it is all invisible to them–and there’s no equivalent of a “do not call list” to turn off such tracking.

The right answer is to move toward user-centric advertising, where the user is explicitly in control of all the data used to offer them ads and can even limit the types of ads shown. This resonates with Esther Dyson’s testimony to the Federal Trade Commission at their Townhall on behavioral targeting and her subsequent article at Huffington Post, where she proposed using a “Disclosure 2.0″ approach to this issue.

If advertisers and ad networks can create real value with behavioral tracking and targeting, then full disclosure–and even full user control–will only enhance trust and deepen the relationships between businesses and customers. The long term value of a customer depends on building viable, healthy relationships. Relationships depend on trust. By engaging openly and responsively with their customers–with full disclosure and as much user control as possible–companies can craft entirely new, more trusting and more profitable relationships while customers feel more comfortable about their personal boundaries, have increased confidence in their vendors, and get easier access to better products and services.

Advertisers need to get this. Ad networks and search engines need to support it. And it may be that regulators need to enforce it.

[This is precisely the sort of payoff for vendors that Project VRM is working towards.]

Over at On the Pod, Duncan Riley hosts a rambling but intriguing chat about APML and its relationship with the latest Social Network developments:

Ashley Angell, Chris Saad (Faraday Media) and Jon Cianciullo (Cluztr) join Duncan Riley to discuss APML, OpenAuth, OpenSocial and how we are moving towards open data sharing.

Even with the audio problems, it is worth listening to the whole bit. There is a great, concise analysis of the real value and limitations of OpenSocial, but my ears perked up especially when Chris endorses VRM and, more importantly, connects the success of APML to its role in providing user control over Attention data.

I have said several times that Attention efforts are missing the big win, digerati conversations about the “Attention Economy” notwithstanding. Getting your attention without providing value is annoying. We will soon see the impact of that as people begin to react to Facebook’s latest innovations in advertising.

It sounds redundant to say it, but the real goal for people is to realize our Intentions. That’s what “intention” means. We put our energy and will into realizing our intentions. Attention just happens to be how we filter out the signal from the noise. It does not inherently translate to value for anyone. In fact, distracting your attention is a key skill of politicians, magicians, and con-men everywhere. So, it isn’t about “Attention.” It’s about “Intention.”

The opportunity, then, for service providers and software vendors is to provide tools for individuals to manage their Intention. Solve that while facilitating vendors’ goals–because many, but not all, Intention activities are directly monetizable in a transaction–and you have a service or product that can generate serious value for everyone involved.

That’s the promise of VRM.

As I’ve mentioned before, VRM–or Vendor Relationship Management–is at the core of SwitchBook’s approach to tools for Complex Search. Our involvement in that effort has transformed how we think about Search, advertising, and online marketplaces.

VRM’s mandate is straightforward: Enable buyers and sellers to build mutually beneficial relationships. The vast majority of online buyer/seller relationships include Complex Searches prior to a transaction and the bigger the transaction amount, the more effort that goes into the Search and therefore, the more important and useful the tools provided to individuals. We see a direct link between providing people control over their online Searches and enabling them to have richer, more rewarding relationships with vendors. To us that means simplifying how people realize their Intentions online by connecting them with the right resources more efficiently and more credibly.

What is intriguing about the podcast is the endorsement of VRM and the related commitment to empowering user choice through APML tools. Whatever words we use to describe it–”Attention” or “Intention”–increased user control is definitely part of the solution.

As Attention becomes more and more shaped to be responsive to user choice rather than a smart database of people’s online behavior, and the more it empowers both explicit expressions of interest and the implicit meaning we can glean from people’s clickstreams, the closer Attention comes to Intention.

To be fair, much of what we are doing with Intention incorporates a lot of Attention data. So, while there are still some key distinctions, it is good to see APML folks talking about VRM in a way that suggests a fruitful convergence is not so far away.

Jim Bursch gives an interesting analysis of his economic model for mindshare. MyMindshare is Jim’s company, a marketplace for buying and selling attention, or as Jim calls it, mindshare.

I’ve criticized MyMindshare’s premise before because it looks a lot like PayPerPost, which remains, IMO, a shill engine in a world where authenticity matters more than the price you can get for selling out. (This I still believe, despite Jason Calacanis’s latest transformation on the topic during his interview with Ted Murphy, Founder / CEO of PayPerPost.) Ted argues that blogging is entertainment and we don’t see upfront disclosures in movies when product placement deals have been struck. I find that wanting. Blogs work, IMO, because they tap an authentic voice, in high contrast to the polished productions of major websites and modern radio, TV, and film. That authenticity is what makes the blogosphere work. And when it breaks down, as in the Kathy Sierra case, it gets really ugly. Ted’s entire business model is about hawking that authenticity to the highest bidder.

Unfortunately, MyMindshare is following a similar path. Jim’s latest article dives deep into his economic argument for the rightness of his cause. To his credit, he makes a lot of sense. Why shouldn’t users get a piece of the kickback that normally goes to publishers in the CPA (cost-per-action) marketplace? On its surface, it is a straightforward question that deserves an answer. Jim’s economic breakdown of the supply and demand curves of mindshare is spot on. But the issue isn’t about economics.

It’s about emotions, relationships, and authenticity. Money changes everything in that context.

Advertisers, brand marketers, and salespeople have known for thousands of years that people buy with their emotions, not with their calculators. Sure, microeconomic theory is a decent framework for evaluating the rational influences of pricing on decision making. But its foundation is based on rational behavior in the marketplace. There are so many examples where that assumption proves false that it is amazing the assumption leads to any insights in the first place.

People pay more for Macintosh not because it is more efficient, but because the brand makes them feel good. We subscribe to public radio not because we lose access if we don’t–the radio service is free–but because we feel better about ourselves and our world when we support a cause that we care about. So, let’s start our critique of the economics of mindshare with an observation that even when spending our money, we act irrationally and emotionally.

It gets even more intense when we turn our attention to taking money for our actions. In modern western culture, we value free will and choice, and we judge character based on both. How we live our lives makes a statement about who we are. Because of that, we pride ourselves on making choices based on our innermost truths, on noble, higher ideals. We fight for freedom, stand up against injustices, and dive headlong into romantic pursuits of our noblest calling: love. It matters that we choose our way of our own free will. We cherish more those things we do simply because we want to, compared to those things we do because we are paid.

Think about that.

Getting paid for doing something cheapens it. We value it less.

It cheapens it because when you do it for its own sake, the effort or outcome itself is worth the time and energy. When you take money for it, it means that the effort or outcome wasn’t enough on its own. The first case demands a higher valuation. The latter, a lesser.

The only way getting paid doesn’t cheapen the work is if you are a professional, or aspire to be a professional in that field. Then, you are judged on your merits as a professional. Getting paid to be a ringer on a company softball team is offensive. Getting paid to play professional baseball is an honor.

And that’s where both Ted and Jim miss the mark.

In Ted’s case, he’s either cheapening the act of blogging by robbing it of its authenticity or he is creating a class of professional bloggers, who should be judged by professional standards. There is a potential third way if his bloggers adopt the positioning as professional entertainers, but the PayPerPost system isn’t ramped up to promote entertainer-bloggers.

In Jim’s case, he’s either cheapening the act of surfing by robbing it of its authenticity or he is creating a class of professional link clickers.

What?

Professional link clickers?

It’s crazy. And useless. It adds nothing fundamentally enriching to our economy, especially as those buying the links are looking for authentic shoppers, not professionals looking to make a buck. Now, there is a chance that the economics of certain products actually make it worthwhile for advertisers to advertise directly to that class of people who are professional clickers. Maybe if I have a product geared directly towards those individuals, then it might be profitable for me to target them, but I don’t see this as the market focus for MyMindshare.

The problem with paying folks for clicks or posts is that it robs the action of its emotional authenticity. And that’s what advertisers are paying for. When someone actually cares enough about a topic to post about it without compensation, that means something. When someone actually cares enough to click on a link even when they aren’t being paid to do so, that means something. Both make clear statements about the emotional and intentional disposition of the actor. And it is when we have people in an emotionally favorable disposition that we have the greatest chance of engaging them in a positive exchange. That’s what advertisers want.

Let’s take Jim’s and Ted’s position argument to its logical, yet politically incorrect extension. Instead of dinners, dates, flowers, gifts, and attention, why not pay our love interests directly in cash? After all, time is money. Gifts cost money. At the end of the day, all that $$$ invested in courtship could just be transferred directly to the ultimate recipient, without all those middlemen like restauranteurs, candy makers, florists, and jewelers getting a piece of the action. Let’s disintermediate those middlemen and go straight to the end provider.

Of course, that just isn’t acceptable in our society, because paying for it cheapens it. The only alternative is to be a professional and whether illegal or not, treating your love interest as a prostitute is usually a relationship ending move. It demonstrates a complete moral and emotional bankruptcy. In fact, the topic itself is so distasteful, it was a challenge for me to include it in this post. That same distates resonates with and taints the PayPerPost and MyMindshare business models.

From what I’ve seen, Jim and Ted seem like upright, straightforward guys. They see an opportunity in the marketplace and are busting their butts building a business around those opportunities. I respect that. It takes courage to quit your day job and bet it all on your own startup. They have also both been extremely straightforward, willing to engage the community and make their case. There’s no slight of hand, no intent to decieve, no scam or fraud involved whatsoever. For that, they deserve credit. Their business models, however, leave me with an unsavory taste in my mouth. I don’t know if either business case is “fixable”, but I do wish them both the best in building successful, honorable ventures.

There’s been a lot said about the new Attention Economy and a lot of interest in generating value from “Attention Data.” The enthusiasm bubbles up from excitement about a new abundance to reach the conclusion that Attention is now the scarce resource that smart people will use to create wealth in our post-mass-media, post-mass-production world.

The problem starts with the excitement about a “general abundance” in our newly digital world which Wired famously referred to as The Long Boom in 1997, but we eventually realized was just the Big Bubble. The problem of the New Attention Economy then expands beyond simply a new “Economics of Abundance” with a hubristic assertion that Attention is the secret ingredient for future success, complete with calls to invent an entire new “Attention Economics.”

Unfortunately, Attention is only limited because time is limited. Its value is ephemeral at best and annoying at worst.

We each have just as much Attention in any given day as we have conscious, waking hours. It’s just a function of time. Simultaneously, Attention, once earned, has fairly lightweight value. It can be earned by a distracting but ineffective advertisement and does not in itself indicate anything other than a first-order stimulus response. Put flaming letters flying across the sky, I’ll probably look up at it and pay Attention for a moment. But that doesn’t mean I’ll do anything in response.

So Attention not only presents nothing unique in terms of scarcity, its value is intrinsically frail. That isn’t an exciting basis for a new economy.

Abe Burmesiter over at Abstract Dynamics has a different take on why there is no new “Attention Economy” (worth reading in its entirety):

Somewhere on the edge of academia circulates the idea that economics is defined as the “study of how human beings allocate scarce resources”. It’s a definition that doesn’t show up in most dictionaries, but it has a stubborn persistence…

It’s a curious distortion to make economics strictly a study of scarcity, and like the textbook chaos theory case it starts out as a rather minor disruption. Scarcity is after all essential to the generation of price and value, and economists hold those processes dear to their hearts. There is of course more to economics than just studying scarcity, but it’s not exactly an alien concept. What’s curious is what happens when non economists start latching onto the distortion, what’s curious is when scarcity meets attention from three different directions.

Michael Goldhaber, Richard Lanham and Georg Franck, all more or less independently converged on a phrase, “the economics of attention” in the past decade or so. At the core of their thought (which varies widely in quality) is the observation that in a time where information is becoming, in Goldhaber’s terms, “superabundant” what is scarce is attention…

The first irony is that if economics was really just to be about the distribution of scarce resources it wouldn’t even be about money. For money is about as far from a scarce resource as there is. It can be printed out by any government and by a skilled counterfeiter too. Or it can be generated by any group or organization with enough clout… Money is anything but scarce. The problem is not there is not enough, but that it circulates with a damaging inequality.

Goldhaber and Lanham though don’t seem really want economics to be about money anyways though. They’d much rather refocus it all around attention. It’s an act of overstatement that probably does them far more harm than good. They get to make exaggerated statements about the need for a new economics, perhaps it makes their observations seem bigger, but it also makes it far easier to ignore them. They might want it all to be about attention, but quality and accuracy still have a bit of value left in them. Someone is going to make a career pulling attention scarcity into the wider economic stream of thought, but it just wont have the extreme ramifications the attention lovers vest into it.

In short, thinking about Attention may be intriguing, but it isn’t going to be the foundation for a new economics. It isn’t going to reinvent how we do business or how we work as a society.

So, despite others’ feverish efforts to the contrary, I’ll go on the record as stating unequivocally, 2007 will not be the year of the Attention Economy. Neither will 2008, 2009 or 2010.

For my money, I’m betting on Intention, VRM, and ComplexSearch.

What do you get when you turn proprietary data silos inside out?

Users in control.

Doc Searls has been advocating VRM for a while (here too). What’s nice about his thinking — in addition to the open source/open standards approach we’d expect from a senior editor at the Linux Journal — is that he’s working the problem through the entire technological spectrum:

I don’t think VRM should be confined to a browser, either. I think this is something that should work through a cell phone, a card, or any other device or representation that works for the individual.

Not only are the vendor’s silos being turned inside out, so are the technology and network providers’.

My mindset has been stuck in the browser, perhaps with an accompanying helper application that does nice things for users, but still basically software on a personal computer. At the core, SwitchBook’s innovation is useful in larger contexts, but it won’t start out that way. Our strategy in simple:

1. Make it work with current search habits.
2. Augment IE and Firefox.
3. Expand to other OSes and browsers as quickly as possible.
4. Push the underlying API and data format as an open standard.
5. Open the tool for customization as widely as possible.
6. Open source the code for “built-in” customization

But are we going to take the time now to make sure it works in cell phones or datacards or iPods or anything other than a computer? There just isn’t enough bandwidth for that in a bootstrapping startup.

Fortunately, Doc’s VRM work as a Fellow at the Berkman Center gives him the freedom to invest in a solution of that breadth. A VRM solution that is bigger than any one company, technology, platform, or medium. Say goodbye to the silos.

It has also given me a fresh way to think about Complex Search. Much of VRM — as I understand it — is designed to be automagic. Specify your needs, receive bids from selected/qualified vendors using a tool that makes it easy to manage those relationships. But before one can specify needs, most people need to spend time discovering their needs. For all but the simplest purchases, that’s a Complex Search.

For example, take Doc’s latest VRM “Gesture”

I want a phone that is GSM-based (so it works overseas as well as in the U.S.), works across as much of the U.S. and Canada as possible (Verizon has been a disappointment in this respect), has a GPS, and has an easy-to-use UI. I don’t care about PDA functions, ringtones (I like the old Western Electric bell ring, though), or camera functions. I like keys that are easy to read and use, and an address book that’s easy to synchronize with a computer. It would be nice, for personal reasons (I work for Linux Journal), if it ran on Linux. I’d rather it not (for the same reason) run on Windows. Mostly I just want it to be a good GSM phone with a GPS. And I’m willing to let the GPS function slide, just to get a good phone.

That’s a mouthful. Doc is famous enough in the blogoverse to get feedback without the VRM infrastructure. He may not have a vendor make an offer directly (although a smart vendor would seriously consider sponsoring Doc), but he’ll probably get enough direction from peers to narrow down his vendor choices. With a fully operating VRM, the fulfilment side of that gesture will be streamlined and automated so that any vendor who wants to can cost-effectively make Doc a competitive offer, perhaps even a bundled package that leverages their unique value-add. That will take a lot of work, but the potential value to everyone in the transaction is clear.

Compare that to the broad, politicized, unfocused brush strokes of the AttentionTrust and you can see why I think the AttentionTrust goals are still too blurry and ambiguous to generate much success. VRM is working with Intention. It is highly focused. Its output is clear. The benefit to users and vendors is evident. AttentionTrust is stuck thinking about everything, all the time, and only online, then mashing that into some anonymized goulash from which magic is supposed to emerge. Bah humbug. I’ll believe it when I see it.

I think Doc is on to something, though. The Internet so radically drops the costs of so many different modes of communication, it will continue to restructure our society for another couple of decades, at least. Most of the success to date has been based on one-to-many marketplaces, such as Amazon or many-<aggregated-as-one>-to-many marketplaces such as eBay. VRM lets us create inverted “many-to-one” markets. Markets of one. Make your gesture, create a market. That’s powerful.

And yet, Doc’s gesture — as every request for bids must — also contains a treasure trove in the form of Doc’s requirements, a wealth of needs Doc learned the hard way. He’s a power user with heavy demands and he pushes technology to its limits. He is fed up with his current options and, having experimented enough, he knows just what wants. But he’s lucky to have that experience. Most people have no idea what the deciding factors could or should be for the products they want to buy. (Can you say megapixel?) Doc is anything but a typical consumer.

Consider what it was like when the web started taking off in 1994/5/6. At that time, I was out selling Internet marketing services and helping companies figure out what to do online. Overwhelmingly, time and again, smart, capable, professional people asked “How much does a website cost?” Well, what kind of website do you want? Their question was inherently non-sensical, but people didn’t understand that yet.

First, you have to figure out what you want, then, and only then, can you send out an RFP to get bids on it. Sure, you scale your RFP based on what your budget is — and unless you have deep pockets, it pays to be prudent in what you include in your request — but at the end of the day, only a detailed specification provides enough direction for vendors to submit a bid. The result of these conversations was often a small strategy and/or requirements engineering contract to distill their needs into just such an RFP.

So how does that work with VRM? How do people develop enough expertise and understanding of their needs so they can present a request like Docs? How does VRM work for regular folk?

In short, they search. They explore. They learn.

From friends. By reading reviews. Going to various manufacturer’s and vendor’s websites. By learning from people like Doc, either through blogs, reviews at CNET or ThisNext, pricing at PriceGrabber, Google, or through direct conversations. By trying out products. Even from advertising and retail stores. I happened to learn about Verizon’s data services in the Verizon store. Imagine that.

This is Complex Search. People aren’t going to rely on any one vendor or reference point, unless they have an absolutely trusted guide like a brother or daughter or college roommate to point them in the right direction. They are going to check out different sources, browse multiple websites, collate and corollate a lot of information from a lot of different places. Then, after they have searched and narrowed their needs down to the details, they can put it in the form of a digital RFP and see the power of VRM kick in. Zing! A Market of One.

VRM is still evolving. Questions and answers of many varieties must work their way through the community, from people’s and companies’ needs to draft technological frameworks, APIs, protocols, and working code. Good stuff.

Somewhere in there, I’m confident Complex Search will meet VRM and lots of real value will be created for people, vendors, and innovators alike.

Doc will be at the Identity Workshop in early December to discuss VRM and Identity with all comers. It should be a great opportunity to figure out where VRM is headed and how we can contribute. I hope you can make it.

Kim Cameron points to a post by Deborah Schultz, which happens to be a great segue into my follow up with Steve Gillmor:

My latest mantra:

Everyone step away from the keyboard and Engage with Intent in “offline community”

Steve left me a comment the other day, inviting me to call him. So I did.

It was a good conversation.

I still have some lingering questions that will probably only resolve once the GestureBank system gets into play–such as how the system threads the balance between lost context from anonymity and richer context with greater risk of privacy loss–but on the whole, I emerged a stronger supporter of the AttentionTrust.

Why? Mostly because most of my issues appear to be non-issues for the vision that Steve is working to bring into reality. My concerns should be able to work themselves out within the context of the community and still retain integrity to what Steve is trying to create.

I can work with that.

So let’s take a look at some confusing language in the AttentionTrust principles.

Our Principles

When you pay attention to something (and when you ignore something), data is created. This “attention data” is a valuable resource that reflects your interests, your activities and your values, and it serves as a proxy for your attention.

AttentionTrust then presents four rights of users with regards to Attention Data: Ownership, Mobility, Economy, and Transparency.

The problem is that the opening definition of “attention data” is bigger and broader than what is covered by the rights of users regarding “Attention Data”. The rights work when limited to the data recorded by the AttentionTrust Recorder (or similar client-side attention tracking software), but not with the definition actually presented.

In fact, the rights are extremely useful as a foundation for re-using attention data in broader contexts, where users might otherwise be disinterested in exposing this information without some protection. Without such principles, the entire ecosystem of Gestures and Attention that Steve is championing falls apart. So they are a critical foundation for the new system.

But the opening definition seems to apply to all attention, not just that recorded by the user.

When you pay attention to something (and when you ignore something), data is created.

This is true today, even without the Attention Recorder. When I visit a website, a log of my http transactions is created. When I visit Amazon, they track what I’ve looked at, purchased, and added to my Wishlist. When I go to Google, they keep track of the search I’m currently doing, if only to let me page through the results.

This is also “attention data,” created because users pay attention to various websites. But users don’t own it. It represents the attention data for the website and the website owners own it. The website paid attention to users and chose to keep track of it. I commented on this in detail in a previous post.

Steve’s response: “That’s not what we mean by attention data.” But it sure sounds that way. So Steve asked me to suggest some alternative language.

Here goes:

Paying attention matters. When you view a website, read email, or post to a blog, your activities–or gestures–are evidence of your attention and can be logged. That log of “attention data” is a valuable resource that reflects your interests, your activities and your values; it serves as a proxy for your attention.

Because you tracked it on your system, you have certain rights regarding your Attention Data.

This may not be as concise as the previous post. Perhaps it loses some points–such as the idea of the attention data created by /not/ paying attention. I suggest however, that it is a much clearer description of what is actually meant by the AttentionTrust and GestureBank.

Try it on for size.

Let me know what you think.

Jim Bursch commented on my latest Attention post, suggesting his own My Mindshare 10-point Declaration is aligned with the AttentionTrust. Unfortunately, it looks like he is getting slammed at Craigslist and not getting traction in the blogoverse (from reading his blog).

Jim, I think you might be running into backlash from the PayPerPost click-fraud-like problem (the link is to Doc Searls’ discussion of same).

I know, you slam it in your own blog as well, but it really does come across as something very similar. At the very top of things, you push for value in terms of paying users to be a part of your co-op:

A pay-per-click bulletin board that
pays you for your mindshare.

And then on the “Mind Control” bulletin board:

That sure sounds a lot like PayPerPost.

It seems like you might be sincere, but the immediate appeal to $$ for clickstream behavior sounds a lot like PayPerPost’s approach to monetizing Attention. Which is to say, a big turn off.

You might also kill the music on your home page. That happens to be one of the top ten online advertising techniques that people hate.

The tricky thing is, in some ways, you are aligned with AttentionTrust.

Now, I do owe Steve Gillmor a call to find out more about how GestureBank is going to work and at a minimum it anonymizes user behavior, which is a huge advance over Jim’s approach. But somewhere along the line, isn’t it also going to generate value for users in some concrete way? Maybe not direct payments, but extracting value from our clickstream has a lot of parallels with PayPerPost and MyMindshare.

The non-profit status of the AttentionTrust and the focus on user rights and privacy protection make their efforts much more seemly, but I’m looking forward to getting more details from Steve.

If, at the end of the day, Attention is to be monetized directly, how do we distinguish the PayPerPost’s from more legitimate efforts?

(after further thought, maybe it is just a matter of transparency & disclosure…)

Evan Schuman writes about a new standard from the Association for Retail Technical Standards (ARTS) that will help online retailers interoperate on the semantic web, making it much easier for Search engines to return results that include accurate and timely information on current retail offerings. ARTS is a part of the National Retail Federation (NRF).

Most of the big players had some role, from Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL to Target, Penney’s, and REI.

It’s an early step, but definitely one in the right direction. Schuman mentions that Circuit City and AOL have been in trial for three weeks with the data formats, which use XML to communicate with Search engines. For example, one format allows retailers to submit updates about product information including product name, price, URL, image, description, color, size, in-stock status, and shipping fees.

When the bugs are worked out, this (or an alternative) will prove a critical component in any Vendor Relationship Management system.

Good work. I’m looking forward to seeing how it evolves.

It’s already being discussed on the microformats list, which could extend the reach of the standard beyond big retailers with well-honed IT departments, allowing smaller operators to use standard semantic XHTML to present the same data. Expect that process to take some time, but it should definitely be helped by the prior work done by ARTS.

I’ve panned the AttentionTrust quite a bit in my first few posts, but I must say it is really because they are so close to spot on. Powerfully close. Now if we can just jump from there to something we can actually use…

Squirrel Tao writes a bit about attention from a creativity standpoint. That’s attention with a little “a”. It’s nice, though, how the thinking applies equally well to Attention, with a big “A”.

The post finishes with:

Willian James wrote, “If we wish to keep our attention upon one and the same object, we must seek constantly to find out something new about it.”

An absolute brilliant statement that subtly points out one of the key flaws of the GestureBank. What is the object of Attention in the GestureBank? Clickstream logs like the AttentionTrust Extension capture all activity and mish mosh it into a goulash, in the hope that after the fact, one can extract or identify the object of attention. The GestureBank then takes that data and makes an even bigger goulash. But as Chris Anderson writes in The Long Tail, top ten lists are useless without context. It is only in the niches that we can get value out of knowing the most common similar results. Clustering is one way to mathematically generate niches, but its use will prove limited to spaces where clean mathematical separation exists. So why does the GestureBank systematically strip the user context from the already context-free Attention log? That makes it pretty hard to discover the object of the user’s Attention.

Why not just let the user tell us?

Then we can avoid the whole post-activity reconstruction/clustering/meta-modelling thing.