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.
