Ed Batista

Beth Kanter on Joshua Schachter

Beth Kanter has a great post on Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us, who was recently interviewed by David Weinberger at the Berkman Center:

Weinberger started the next question off with “You’re the poster child for Web 2.0 and folksonomy.”  Schachter jumped in with, “I don’t use the word ‘folksonomy. Tagging in delicious is about 1/3 classification and 2/3 functionality. Something easy to do that let's you recall the item. The goal isn’t to classify, it’s to remember.”

Weinberger said, “The other aspect of delicious is that I can participate in a tag stream that is of interest to me. For example, taxonomy. That stream of tags that comes through everyday is very rich and a valuable resource. One of the reasons that I tag stuff is that I want to contribute to the knowledge stream.”

Schachter, “Exactly, think of tags as votes. You’re doing it for yourself, but the good of the group. Delicious is about memory first, discovery second.

Weinberger noted, “Delicious feels so social to us, we want to know who else has tagged the information, we want to know who they are.”  Schachter, “I haven’t come out with a pleasing way to display the information. When delicious tells you the number of people who bookmarked, I hate the way it looks. When I took it out, people complained. I replaced it with a bar graph. It shows popularity – large number. If just one other person bookmark, it shows a link. Popularity or lack of popularity lets you know something.”

Weinberger, “One of the problems with tagging is the ambiguity of language that we use for tags. Enterprise can mean one thing in the business community or it can mean Star Trek. What are you going to do as the system gets larger?”  Schachter replied, “Clustering the data. One tag by one person is one tag by a human. From there, you do math to make connections to what other people are using with the help of statistics. Show your terms in their language.”

Schachter said there are new features coming that are more social or will be group oriented. The first one will be the ability to pick out people for my network and the other will be private groups or private tagging networks.

I'm intrigued by the social tagging features.  The ability to specific individuals whose tags are important to me and to designate them as members of my network (and optimally, to prioritize and/or label them within my network) is highly relevant to my work with AttentionTrust, as well as to other social reference tools like Outfoxed (which was developed by Stan James, who also worked on the AttentionTrust Extension.)

GoogleReader

One of my first posts on this site was a complaint about Bloglines' interface (and the generally poor design of most aggregators).  GoogleReader is far from perfect, but it's a different approach that's an improvement in some key areas (but not all).  I much prefer the way GReader displays individual posts, and I like the navigation, but I find Bloglines' traditional folder structure for feeds more intuitive than GReader's labeling system.  But it's progress, nonetheless, and I'm happy to have a choice.

UPDATE: The obivous difference between GReader's feed management and Blogline's is that the former uses tags (or "labels" in Google-speak), a la Gmail.  I appreciate the ability to apply multiple tags to a single feed, a feature that will only get more valuable the more feeds one subscribes to, but I find that Bloglines' boring old folders give me a better overall view of the 82 feeds I currently subscribe to--who's been posting up a storm, where should I focus my attention, etc.  Still not clear to me which is the better tool.

AttentionTrust Needs You!

The Bottom Line:

AttentionTrust is inviting developers to create applications that will make use of “attention data” being generated by users of the AttentionTrust Extension, an "attention recorder" in the form of a Firefox extension that captures aspects of users’ clickstream and browsing history. To get involved, please download the AttentionTrust Extension and the Attention Toolkit, which records attention data from the Extension to a MySQL database.

There more info below on 1) An Overview of AttentionTrust, 2) What We've Been Up To Lately, and 3) Possible Attention Applications.  Please refer this post to anyone who might be interested, and contact us if you have any questions.  Thanks!

1) An Overview of AttentionTrust:

Each of us is constantly creating metadata that reflects what we’re paying attention to (and what we’re ignoring), ranging from our browsing histories to our digital playlists. This “attention data” is an incredibly valuable resource that could allow us to understand what attracts our attention and how we spend our time.

But most troves of attention data are inaccessible to individual users, and until now users have lacked the ability to capture and analyze attention data on their own. That’s where AttentionTrust comes in. We’re a newly formed nonprofit organization with a three-part mission:

1. Educate people about the value of their attention and the existence of "attention data."
2. Empower people to exert greater control over their attention data by developing tools such as the AttentionTrust Extension.
3. Build a community of individuals and organizations that will guarantee users' rights to own, move, and exchange their attention data, in a transparent environment that gives users freedom of choice.

2) What’s AttentionTrust Been Up To Lately?

• We released the AttentionTrust Extension, an “attention recorder” in the form of a Firefox You can download the Extension now, and more information is available at our FAQ and specs and resources page.
• We also released the Attention Toolkit, a free, open-source utility that records data from the AttentionTrust Extension to a MySQL database. This Toolkit is intended to serve as the starting point for developers seeking to query and understand attention data, and to build interesting applications making use of this data. For more information, visit the Attention Toolkit page. You can also download the Attention Toolkit now.
• We launched the AttentionTrust wiki, where users can share feedback on the Extension and the Toolkit, request new features or services from AttentionTrust, and participate in a community of like-minded developers.
• We began posting at the AttentionTrust blog, where we’re gathering comments on the Extension and the general concept of attention data from around the web. People who’ve been writing about AttentionTrust include Marco Barulli, Anil Bawa, Eric Butler, James Governor, Kaliya Hamlin, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Steve Krause, Paul Miller, Eric Norlin, Dare Obasanjo, and Michael Sanford, as well as members of our own Board of Directors.
• We’ve signed up hundreds of AttentionTrust members, people who are committed to supporting the AttentionTrust principles that users should be able to own, manage and exchange their attention data in a transparent environment that gives users freedom of choice.
• And we held our first public Board meeting at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Thanks to Steve Borsch, you can download an MP3 file (52.1 MB) and listen to the meeting.

3) What Are Some Possible Attention Applications?

The AttentionTrust Extension will allow users to capture, analyze and exchange their attention data, unlocking a tremendous range of interesting applications:

• Where Does My Time Go?  People could analyze their own attention data in order to better understand what’s catching their attention and where they’re spending their time.
• Get Connected: People could be connected with others who share their interests, based on an analysis of their mutual attention data. This functionality could support a dating service, or a book club, or a political campaign.
• What are YOU Paying Attention To?  People could opt to share their attention data with other individuals in their personal networks, or with the public via a syndication feed. This functionality could support a range of "recommender" services that point people to content that’s catching the attention of others in their network or of individuals whose opinions are of interest to them.
• What's the Web Paying Attention To?  People could use aggregated attention data to find content that’s attracting attention across the web.
• What's In It for Me?  People could opt to share all or segments of their attention data with companies and other institutions in exchange for something of value, such as a discount on purchases, or personalized services based on the interests expressed in their attention data.

These are just a few of the possibilities, and we encourage you to join us in dreaming of more. If we can help in any way, please contact us. Thanks for your support!

attention attentiontrust

More on Recovery 2.0

As noted below, I was lucky enough to sit in on a session at Web 2.0 last night organized by Jeff Jarvis and Greg Burton on Recovery 2.0, i.e. working to prevent future Katrinas through better disaster planning, preparedness and response.  One of the primary exercises we went through was coming up with a list of characteristics disaster systems should have--and which were often seen to be lacking on the Gulf Coast.

I think it's important to keep in mind, as Jeff noted, that there's no one single IT here--we're not talking about building an uber-system, some sort of Ultimate Defense Against Bad Things Happening.  We know that's not realistic--or even desirable, thinking about what fun the laws of unintended consequences would have with such a venture.

What we're talking about is 1) building a network of loosely joined people and initiatives who care and who want to take action (and a great place to start is the Recovery 2.0 wiki), and 2) working to insure that all the systems involved in helping people prepare, survive and recover from disasters benefit from the lessons that Katrina taught us (in short, insuring that Katrina's victims did not die or suffer in vain.)

So here's my copy of the list we brainstormed.  As someone pointed out, it's contradictory.  (Do we contradict ourselves?  Very well then, we contradict ourselves.)  And without last evening's discussion as context, it's somewhat cryptic, but I still think it's interesting:

Recovery 2.0

The highlight of Web 2.0 today was actually a very low-key, low-tech session on "Recovery 2.0," i.e. working to prevent future Katrinas through better disaster planning, preparedness and response.  Jeff Jarvis led the session, having raised the call to arms in a recent post and arranged for the space with the Web 2.0 organizers, and we had a great turnout, given the competition (free booze at any of a number of sponsored events) and the timeslot (6pm after a long day of conferencing).  Even some bigshots like Michael Powell and Craig Newmark showed up.

We introduced ourselves (a very valuable community-building experience, even if it does entice some people who really should know better into talking at great length about their Special Story),  brainstormed a list of characteristics that any Recovery 2.0 initiatives should have, and agreed to keep working together at the Recovery 2.0 wiki.  A good meeting--focused but inclusive, open-minded but with a tangible outcome, and it ended on time!  Kudos to Jeff and Greg Burton for pulling it together--I'm excited about the next steps.

recovery2

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.

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AttentionTrust at Web 2.0

The AttentionTrust gang will be convening at Web 2.0 tomorrow.  Seth and Steve will be hosting a session at 1:30pm, during which we'll be unveiling the alpha version of the AttentionTrust Extension, a Firefox extension that will allow users to begin to record aspects of their "attention data."  This is a small but significant step toward our goal of empowering users to exert greater control over their attention data so that they can make effective use of it.  And no disrespect to AT's original web designers, but we'll also be unveiling long-overdue new look for the AT website.  Long overdue.