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.â€
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.
Joe —
I’ve been following your posts with great interest and believe you’re sincere in your assessment of AttentionTrust. But I don’t think you yet understand the GestureBank in enough detail to validate your comments in this post. Part of the fault lies in my not having released the sufficient information for you to work with. Robert Anderson and I, along with AttentionTrust technical director Cori Schliegel are in the process of integrating GestureBank into the Trust, and we will shortly be releasing documents that will answer many if not all your questions. In the meantime, I’d be glad to chat with you about it offline while development and infrastructure are being fleshed out. While I agree with Doc’s intention ideas and note that he developed them in part as he struggled to understand my admittedly germinal ideas around gestures, I see gestures as rolling up significantly more than just intention, including the gestures of intuition and inattention which form high value triage of information through the open pool. What I don’t see understood here is that the GestureBank is a critical enabler of a market opportunity that harvests implicit and explicit gestures –why not indeed just let the user tell us — that are at the heart of the inversion of the communication model that I have called gestures from the very beginning. Looking forward to your email, or you can call me at 415-602-8170.
Steve Gillmor
President, AttentionTrust/GestureBank
Steve,
It is nice to hear from you. I’ll be curious to learn more about how you see the GestureBank providing the kind of focus that seems lacking from what I’ve read so far. Clearly there is a lot of value burried in people’s clickstream and Attention data. The hard part is figuring out how to make use of it.
Doc’s ideas have already contributed in significant new ways to my work at SwitchBook, so I’m hopeful that hearing a more detailed perspective from you might do the same.
I’ll take you up on your offer to chat offline and see what I can learn.
I’ve been working on MyMindshare for two years now, and this is the first time I’ve heard of AttentionTrust.org — and I feel a little embarrased about my ignorance.
I’d like to put MyMindshare in perspective with AttentionTrust — they seem to be circling the same thing. For example, here is the My Mindshare 10-point Declaration:
My Mindshare 10-Point Declaration
1. My mindshare is mine.
2. My mindshare has real monetary value.
3. I have a right sell, trade, or keep my mindshare as I choose.
4. Nobody is entitled to take my mindshare without my permission.
5. Unsolicited and intrusive advertising amounts to mindshare theft.
6. Mindshare theft is wrong.
7. I have a right to resist mindshare theft.
8. I demand media that does not deal in stolen mindshare.
9. I support media that respects my mindshare.
10. The world is better when individuals control their mindshare and their media.
For more, visit MyMindshare.com and my blog at Blog.MyMindshare.com.
Pingback: joeandrieu.com » Blog Archive » Monetizing Attention
Pingback: joeandrieu.com » Blog Archive » Real world attention…