A Lawyer Walks Into Second Life...

I had two thoughts today about contexts where attention data could be useful--one serious, the other fanciful.

My wife is a reference librarian and legal research instructor at a law school. Her students and faculty members are constantly devouring huge amounts of legal reference and research materials. Much of this information is unavailable online (or at the very least extremely difficult to access)--but it's all highly organized, with extensive cataloging metadata. What if the students and faculty could capture and share the attention data that's being generated by their research activities? Everything from Lexis search results to checkout histories of old scholarly texts could be compiled to generate a legal research profile for everyone, which could then be cross-referenced to help people focus in on the resources that are likely to be interesting and useful to them. It would be an incredible timesaver.

I've also been thinking about a comment Paul Montgomery left on a post by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch:

...[M]any people like having different personae, and don’t want to be defined as one single entity. The persona they project to a single parent support group will be different to the persona they project at a computer games forum, and different again to the one they present at a P2P porn-sharing message board. If ATX can accomodate different personae for a single person, that might help drag more people in.

This leapt to mind during today's Web 2.0 session on gaming. One of the panelists predicted that the future of role-playing virtual environment games lay in allowing gamers in for free, but conducting actual micro-transactions with their avatars. Well, a gamer's avatar is just another persona, and it's going to be generating all sorts of attention data--where it goes, what it consumes, what other avatars it meets. Why not capture your avatar's attention data in order to share it with other gamers, or with other games? Just a thought.

attention attentiontrust

Comments

[Amy Wright]

I just wanted to add the gentle caveat that academic libraries generally have been very careful about safeguarding the confidentiality of patron circulation records, and we have become even more cautious about such records since the passage of Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

For an overview of the Patriot Act and academic libraries, see Strickland, Minow, and Lipinski's article, "Patriot in the Library," at: http://snipurl.com/iok2

There are certainly some exciting possibilities for attention data in the academic research context, but patrons and librarians would need to consider the legal implications of collecting such data.

[Paul Montgomery]

Ed, ATX could certainly be useful in a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) context. I imagine that sort of thing is already being explored on a game-by-game basis by consultancy firms in that space, such as Themis Group. However, I imagine it would be highly difficult to: (a) develop a widely accepted standard; (b) get that standard adopted in incumbent games like EQ, AC, DAOC, SWG, WoW and UO; and (c) convince the developers to make that information available to the outside world.

The mainstream MMOG industry is currently structured around monthly subscription fees, and until that paradigm is broken, developers won't want to give their CRM data up. Second Life is a nice concept, but it's outside the mainstream for the moment.

I'm glad my comment got you thinking, anyway!

[Ed]

Thanks for the feedback, Paul. I'm sadly in the dark when it comes to how MMOGs actually work (Hey, I loved "Everything Bad is Good for You"--doesn't that count for something?), so I fully admit I'm talking out of my depth here.

But the guy at Web 2.0 (can't remember his name, but he was a panelist in the big room, so at the very least he represented a hefty pile of cash, lots of smart developers and hefty market share) seemed convinced that MMOGs would be moving to a play-for-free, pay-via-microtransactions model. However, I recognize that the difficulty of standard-setting and incumbent-bumping might make this a pipe dream.

Your larger point, though, about the importance of multiple personae, remains very true and highly central to AttentionTrust. Individuals are going to want to be able to present themselves in a variety of ways and contexts. At the same time, entities conducting transactions in the "attention economy" are going to want to be assured that people are who they say they are. (More on that in a number of posts at the AttentionTrust blog. It's a complicated question, and we surely don't have it figured out yet.

On a related note, why is Second Life outside the MMOG mainstream? My (admittedly simplistic) understanding is that the ability to build the game-world around you has a lot of appeal.

[Paul Montgomery]

Ed, Second Life is outside the mainstream because the initial model was subscription-based and the vast majority of users still play subscription-based games. MMOGchart.com has SL's user numbers at a tick over 30,000 at last count, which out of a total user pool of 5 million is a drop in the ocean. Kind of like how Web 2.0 zealots are a minuscule minority amongregular users of this technology they are supposed to all be using tomorrow. :D

Get ready for more complexity though, since MMOG players are very used to the idea of "alts", which are alternate characters. Depending on the race they choose, the faction they are aligned with, the guild they join, and the server they are on, a single player may have 10+ alts with significantly different behaviour patterns. One might be a chatty elf with pretty clothes, another might be a profanity-spewing zombie who griefs the good guys, another might be a silent professional who is in it only for the loot at hihg-level dungeons. I don't envy your job trying to make sense of all that.

[Ed]

Thanks, Paul--very helpful. It's probably going to be a while before attention services focus on alts and avatars, but I still think it's a fascinating possibility.