Attention data, simply enough, is any data that reflects what you're paying attention to. Although I'm writing less frequently about technology on this site these days, I just can't help it on occasion, and the two attention-data-powered widgets below are cases in point. The first one is a list of the most popular websites in my "clickstream," my personal browsing history. The data is captured using my Attention Recorder, an open source extension for the Firefox browser, shared with an account I've opened at Root Markets, my Root Vault, and displayed here via a little code embedded in this post. (Disclosure: I'm the Executive Director of AttentionTrust, the nonprofit that distributes the Recorder, and AttentionTrust was co-founded by Seth Goldstein, CEO of Root.)
I've also embedded the code in the in the right-hand sidebar, just below I'm Listening To..., which is a list of the musical artists I've listened to most frequently over the past week.
The same principle's at work here--the data about the songs I play in iTunes is captured using a plugin from Last.fm, shared with my Last profile, and displayed here via some code provided by Last.
OK, so what? Well, this is interesting to me for any number of reasons: It's a way for me to express myself, to voice my preferences for certain websites and certain musical artists, without requiring any action on my part other than going about my daily business. I visit sites, I play music, and that data is automatically captured, shared and published.
It's also noteworthy that this is behavioral data (i.e. the sites I actually visit, and the music I actually listen to), not articulated data (i.e. the sites I say I visit, and the music I say I like.) It's honest; it's real.
And it's the foundation for an ecosystem--an "attention economy"--within which people are capturing and exchanging their attention data with each other, driving a whole host of personalized discovery and recommendation systems.
tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+data attention+economy root+vaults last.fm
