I just discovered that one of my favorite authors blogs.
I love it.
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A simple way for websites to describe in clear, consistent terms what they do with the data we share.
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Neil Gaiman has a blog
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Thinking about Complex Searches
Google and Yahoo! are part of a thriving industry that provides billions of dollars in real value. Yet in The Search John Batelle and Udi Manber suggest that Search is only about 5% invented. Bill Gross, inventor of the Pay-Per-Click business model (among other accomplishments), follows that thinking, saying in an interview with John Battelle:
I do think pure search sites will continue to prosper, but I also think that there will be many new kinds of specialized search that continue to surprise us. I just made up a little table of the searches I do per day over the last 20 years, looking at some key milestones, like when I started using email heavily, and then when Netscape took off, and then when the first search engine companies went public, and then again when new tools came out, like X1 for searching email, iTunes for searching music, my TomTom for searching for locations.
In other words, current Search solutions do ok, but there is lots of room for innovation. In February, I started working on SwitchBook Software to address a core problem that seems to have been left out of the conversation, called “Complex Search.” (My apologies… the website doesn’t have much there at the time I wrote this blog entry.)
In a sentence, Complex Searches require more than a single result to resolve.
Simple Searches—like finding how to replace the toner in your printer—can resolve quickly once an appropriate online resource is found. When you find the instructions, you are done Searching.
In contrast, Complex Searches—like finding a job or buying a home—require multiple queries, using multiple Search Providers, to discover various aspects of the “result” at multiple final destinations, often Searching for fundamentally different things at different parts of the Search.
For example, when Searching for a home one might begin by asking “What homes are available that fit my criteria?” Then, for each candidate home you find: Is it a good price? What’s crime like in that neighborhood? What kind of financing can I get? What are the schools like? Complex Searches require answering complicated, evolving questions by exploring the web through various Search Providers and websites. Current tools make this difficult.
As Bill Gross’s comments suggest, users today will use many different Search engines to resolve these types of questions, visiting dozens or even hundreds of individual websites over the course of weeks or even months. With today’s tools, this is a pain.
What we need is a tool that helps users keep track of their Search across their entire interaction with the web. Something that not only logs their Attention, it also provides an interface for expressing Intent, transforming it into better results for their Search. It should be nearly invisible, unobtrusively augmenting current Search behavior. It should help sellers as much as buyers. It should both scale well and improve with widespread use. And it should be capable of extensive user customization and open integration with existing search silos, so power-users can surprise us with new functionality and Expedia, CheapTickets, and United.com can not only interoperate, they can individually create new forms of value by providing their own customization.
It should be something like the AttentionTrust‘s GestureBank, but with more focus, structure, and explicit user direction. It should be something like Doc Searl‘s Vendor Relationship Management, but perhaps with more focus on the Search before users are committed to a purchase. It should work seamlessly with Microformats, OpenID, and OpenURL to link user-driven activities to the semantic web through authenticated but privacy-supporting mechanisms. And perhaps most importantly, it should make the most of open standards and open source to reach as many people as quickly as possible.
So, that’s why I’m here. Drop me a line if this is a topic of your interest.
Attention Ownership
Doc Searls replied to my comments about Attention and the AttentionTrust:
We also tend to feel we own whatever parts of the world serve as extensions of ourselves.
Yet, just because we feel that we own it, doesn’t make it so. The Attention movement is pushing back against the perceived loss of power due to wholesale tracking and monetization of online activity traces. Like children crying about their toys, the Attention Gang is saying “Mine!”
But it isn’t. Our interactions online are bi-directional. The digital trace is morally and legally owned by both parties. We have the choice to track our interactions. So do those we interact with.
What we do own is our own copy of that data trace. And because only we have access to all the places we go, we could have an advantage in leveraging that Attention to create value. To the extent that the GestureBank allows this sort of user-driven value, excellent. It’s a fine way to weave gold from the digital breadcrumbs of our daily interactions.
Let me make that perfectly clear. Much of the practical work being done by the AttentionTrust to create Attention tools and services deserves our engagement and support.
But there are some serious flaws in the picture being painted by the AttentionTrust.
You can’t force vendors to give up their property. Users don’t own the server-side traces of their Attention. If I visit a website, that vendor has every right to use every bit of data about that visit and what I do there to improve their business. The AttentionTrust argues that, in fact, vendors don’t own the data on their own servers. Users do. And therefore users should be allowed to delete it.
Ed Batista, the former Executive Director of the AttentionTrust wrote:
Allowing me to get my data out is great–but what if I want to delete it entirely?
That’s like suggesting someone has the right to retro-actively delete all the email or IMs they’ve ever sent me, because it represents their attention. That’s not only unreasonable, in some contexts it would actually be illegal.
In fact, the entire conversation from the Attention Trust ignores the fact that attention in bi-lateral relationships are always a two-way Attention exchange, with mutual benefit already built in. Just as shoppers pay attention at ecommerce websites, ecommerce sites pay attention to shoppers. We pay our attention to websites because they pay attention to us. There is reciprocal attention created.
Imagine if Google decided to ignore you. Or YouTube. Or Amazon. How fun would that be?
No matter how much we would like to assume control over our digital attention, we can’t. Those we pay attention to also own that Attention. After all, we paid it to them. If we can move past the populist politics of arbitrarily asserting the moral primacy of the individual, I think we can get a lot more traction with what we all really want: more value for people.
At the end of the day, that’s what everyone wants. Even companies. When businesses can be a part of creating value for their customers, they can create profit. So let’s stop chasing the red herring of who owns Attention and focus on how we translate Attention into Intention and into more efficient, more effective, and more powerful user choice.
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Attention v Intention
There’s a lot going on at the moment about Attention and Intention, and with all due respect to the Attention folks, I think you guys got it wrong.
Steve Gillmor and the Attention Gang have launched the Attention Trust and generated a lot of buzz and support from a lot of high profile digeratti.
Unfortunately, while chasing noble dreams, the core premise is flawed.
The rights they are fighting for:
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Property
You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish. You have CONTROL.
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Mobility
You can securely move your attention wherever you want whenever you want to. You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention.
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Economy
You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Your attention has WORTH.
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Transparency
You can see exactly how your attention is being used. You can DECIDE who you trust.
Or more concisely (from the AttentionTrust site):
Every individual has the right to own, store, move and exchange the personal attention data they create.
Unfortunately, this digital age bill of rights lacks any firm foundation in social or physical reality. We neither own nor control our attention. We never have, in any context. We never will. And it would be a bad idea if we did.
Our real-world physiological/conscious making attention is not under our control. It is mediated by a complicated sub-conscious system that decides which symbols–decoded from our environment–deserve a slice of higher-level processing. If the subconscious mind doesn’t think it is important, it doesn’t get any attention. Similarly, the subconscious mind is capable of overriding our conscious attention and directing it somewhere else. We don’t decide to hear the fire alarm. We just do.
This semi-autonomous control is a critical feature. If we could just zoom in to whatever we wanted and exclude our attention from everything else, we would have more theft, more fatal fires, and more car accidents. It’s not to hard to see the evolutionary value in limited control over our attention. Focusing only on what we desire to focus on is an evolutionary dead end.
Clearly, “Attention” is just a metaphor, and I can hear the rebuttal that the physiological etymology of the Attention Gang’s “Attention” isn’t what’s important.
So let’s look at the physical world analog to “Attention,” rather than the physiological. A log of where we go in the physical world would be a pretty good proxy for our Attention, in the Attention Gang definition. In fact, it maps almost perfectly to the clickstream we leave on our digital journeys. No one knows what we actually looked at or what we said, but they can know where we were and what we could have looked at. Just like the web.
We’ve never owned that Attention either. And have we never controlled it. Where we go, in public, is public domain. Anyone can report on it. Take note of it. Even take photos of it. In fact, the public nature of that Attention provides opportunity for community. “Hey, Steve, I saw you at the new history museum the other day with your kids. Amazing isn’t it?”
If we do something in private, that’s a different matter. But walking or driving on the streets, going into public stores or venues, all are aspects of real-world attention that we simply don’t own. The most we can do is control where we go. That’s how we control our attention. Just like on the web.
The actual complaint from the Attention Gang seems to be that companies are tracking us and making money off it!!!
Wow. Is it that companies are making money that pisses you off?
The transitional problem we can’t avoid is that it used to be expensive to collect and collate attention data: you needed detectives to track people’s activities. Online, you just need to collate a large enough pool of data. So, we feel a loss of anonymity and that feels like an invasion of privacy. But in truth, it is just the efficiencies of the digital age processing public expressions of attention.
In fact, our attention isn’t actually all that valuable. Sure, it is a limited commodity. Sure, everyone is competing for it. But it is a fickle mistress. What matters isn’t what catches our eye, it is what we do about it. Go window shopping someday and I assure you the store owners will feel the difference. Have your lover catch you eyeing a potential competitor and you’ll pay for it, but you’ll pay a lot more if caught in flagrante delicto. And somewhere in between these two extremes is when you’re caught with clear intent.
And that brings us to Doc Searls‘ concept of Intention, a much more useful and powerful metaphor for what is happening online.
Intention represents conscious desire and will to action. Attention does not. Intention is under our control. Attention is not.
Even the legal system recognizes this distinction. We can be punished for crimes of intent, in ways that we cannot be for acts of mere “attention.” (Mileage may vary depending on your jurisdiction.)
Intent represents an inherent potential for creating value. Attention does not.
Intention means you want something, a state of the universe that doesn’t yet exist, and that you are willing to act to create it. In constrast, Attention simply means you are observing something. You may not even be particularly interested: for some reason those flaming letters in the sky made you look up. We call that a distraction. However, when people’s desire becomes intention, value generation is immanent.
If you can understand someone’s intent, you can create value by helping him/her realize that intent. In contrast, knowing someone’s attention merely tells you how effective various attention-getting stimuli were. Useful in its place, but a bit circular.
See the difference?
Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of tools to work with intent. Our clickstream is a high profile tool that has been used by merchants and advertisers on the web for over a decade. Online Attention mining has not only earned its keep, it is attracting a counter-revolutionary movement in the Attention Gang. Steve Gillmor said “Nobody can fight us on this.”
And they are clearly striking some cords. In real ways, the inherent privacy of the physical world is being eroded by the transparency of the digital one. It is a real issue. And I’ll talk more in the future about what we can do about it (short version: Identity Gang good).
But at the moment, we have the AttentionTrust rallying troops with a hollow war cry. I look forward to any progress they might make… tools for user-management of attention will naturally support expressions of intent. But attention itself is woefully overrated and I hope we don’t waste too much energy thinking it is the Holy Grail.
The real opportunity isn’t in a war for enhanced privacy. It’s in finding more efficient, more successful, more meaningful ways to satisfy intent. Including the intent to be private.
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Let’s get started.
Thanks to some prompting from Doc Searls, I’m joining the blogoverse, which definitely seems to be more fun than the blogosphere.
I can’t say how things will evolve here, but I’m looking forward to it.
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