wanderingstan

Abdur Chowdhury, Summize.com (formerly at AOL, made decision to release the AOL search data.)

• 3 Questions you must ask yourself before opening your data:
• Why are you opening the data?
• Right answer: You firmly believe that you are helping people/consumers.
• What are you going to do once you open the data?
• Are you ready for the unexpected consequences?

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Gerry Campell

• This is sort of a “coming out party” for Reuters.
• We (Reuters) have content and he have to connect with our consumers. They have trouble finding it.
• Reuters is watching what’s happening out there, looking for how it can serve vertical markets: finance, technology, you name it.

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Esther Dyson

• You’re 85 years old and on your deathbed.  You have 50 million dollars and you have 10,000 friends on Friendster 8.0 … Which is weirder?! You can’t spend all the money and you can’t enjoy that many friendships.

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Chris Law, Aggregate Knowledge

• Your social network is a poor proxy for what you’re interested in.
• Your behavior is a good proxy for what you’re interested in.

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Sanjiv Das, Morgan Stanley

• Information is so important to us, and gives us so much proprietary advantage. “Open data” is scary to us.
• Data is going to be a commodity. get ready for it. The ORGANIZATION of that data may NOT be a commodity.  that’s interesting.

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David Cancel, Compete

• 2 million people being monitored
• 250-300K have the toolbar installed
• ISP’s are monitoring and licensing data to compete

Seth: This is granted deep in the EULA of the ISP?
David: Yes, just like its deep in the EULA of a credit card company.

Seth: How much do you pay an ISP?
David: For an ISP with millions of users, a million or so a month. [year?]

Seth: If I’m a comcast user, I’m worth about $.40/month for my entire clickstream
David: Yes. 10-12 folks buying this data, that I know of. (So you’re worth more than $.40!)

Seth: What percentage of us here are having our clickstream sold, would you guess?
David: 10%

Seth: Is the government buying this too?
David: Yes, I’m pretty sure they are.

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Dick Costolo, Feedburner

• Opening an API can have unplanned good consequences: Overnight we had a ton of new users from Spain. Someone there had used the Feedburner subscription count (obtained via the API) as part of a reputation/ranking algorithm, so now all the blogs were signing up to raise their stats. Now we probably won’t see a competitor come out of Spain.

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Scott Rafer – (formerly of) MyBlogLog

• People got into blogging to make new human connections, and somehow some part of our forebrain mistakes these little pixel collections for human connection.

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Seth Goldstein

• Imagine there is information about “Who is influential” … Who does that info belong to? To the people who are influential? To the people who calculated it?
• Alignment — if you pay attention enough, you start to align with someone. I hate how much I am influenced by Fred Wilson, but I pay attention to his stuff, so I am.

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Random Quotes and Exchanges

“The best guarantee for attention is living your life as openly as possible, expressing yourself as publicly as possible as early as possible.” – Goldhaber

??? – The Genie [of data collection] is out of the bottle, now its time to ask for the 3 wishes. We’ve gotta think carefully about what those 3 wishes should be.

Chris Law (Aggregate Knowledge): I wish AttentionTrust compliance was widespread…we don’t want to surprise people.
Steve Gilmore: This is bullshit.  Have you signed/endorsed the AttentionTrust principles?
Chris Law: No, we’re looking into it.

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Recording one’s attention is a cool idea, even if there aren’t a ton of tools to use it right now. But here’s a thought: What if you had an application that recorded what music you listened to (a form of attention) so that artists could be paid based on how often they’re played.

From a recent Wired article about MP3:

…watermarks could be used to monitor playback in order to determine how to pay artists out of a shared revenue pool, tracking not only what was bought, but how much it was played.

Watermarking may not be the way to go, but if services like Rhapsody catch on, (and I agree this is the future) then this sort of attention tracking could be done automatically.

John Hagel wrote an excellent post, The Aphrodisiac of Attention. I insist that you read it immediately.

Trusted filters, trusted protectors, trusted concierge, human or technical, removing distractions and managing boundaries, filtering signal from noise, enabling meaningful connections, that make us feel secure, are the opportunity for the next generation. Opportunity will be the tools and technologies to take our power back.

Technology will certainly be important, but I remain convinced that technology alone will not maximize the return on our attention. We will need human intermediaries to harness the technology and adapt it to our changing needs. Some of you may remember the concept of the infomediary that Marc Singer and I wrote about in Net Worth. That concept is resurfacing in interesting ways these days.

Trust, filters, social networks, information overload. These are the important ideas.

Last week David Cohen from Colorado Startups invited me to participate in his Podcast on Attention with David Henderson, Dennis Yu of the Social Media Group, David Mandell of Me.dium, and Jim Mansfield of Intela. It was a great discussion; I’m glad that Colorado has some folks thinking deeply about this.

Podcast: Your Attention Please (Direct Link / MP3 )

David Henderson had to cancel at the last minute, but records his thoughts in a follow up interview.

The guy most responsible for getting me into attention just gave a great video interview on Wallstrip. I met Seth just over two years ago in Berlin and honestly didn’t understand all his fuss about “attention”.

This is the talk he should have given me then. The clearest explanation yet of attention and why it matters.

(And as the original author of the Attention Recorder, I must say it’s a cool feeling to have your work mentioned like this!)

Is it time for users to unionize?

I was talking with my friend Fabian shortly after the recent social revolt at FaceBook and we hit upon an amazing parallel. Consider this:

In the early days of the money economy, workers were horribly exploited. During the industrial revolution conditions got bad enough that users began to form unions and fight back for their rights.

Goldhaber now suggests that we are leaving the money economy and entering the attention economy. So are we, the content-creating workers, also being exploited? What else do you call it when web companies are built entirely on user-generated content, but we users are stripped of our rights to that content by onerous EULAs and forced to endure increasingly annoying advertisements? All the while trapped in walled gardens which we’ve been locked into, and the gardeners only listen when we scream.

Every MySpace user I know is absolutely sick of the advertising onslaught and would leave if they could. But they feel trapped because they have so much content invested there, not to mention all their friends.

Could the same techniques that brought down the robber barons also break down the walled gardens of  today’s social media sites? Is it time for unions of users?

In the last weeks I’ve run the idea by many folks from Boulder to San Francisco to New York to Frankfurt. Everyone gets it immediately. Several people are already moving forward with this idea and I look forward to seeing how things play out. I’ll keep you posted.

Last Wednesday I attended the AttentionTrust lunch in San Francisco to hear Michael Goldhaber talk about attention.

Goldhaber is certainly on to something, but I still struggle to pin down exactly what attention is. It’s a very slippery notion. After some thought, I’d like to suggest the idea that attention is meme sex.

Let me explain.

Biological sex is the penultimate act by which a gene may hope to achieve replication in another body. The genes of the mother and father combine somewhat randomly creating a unique set of genes for the child. This is basic biology.

But ideas also replicate, as Dawkins famously suggested in The Selfish Gene.  He proposed the meme as a unit of “cultural information”. I take memes to be much more fine-grained than high-level cultural info. For example, chatting with a friend yesterday morning the meme “YouTube was bought by Google” replicated, my mind playing host to the lastest copy. Memes replicate from one conscious mind to another.

But how exactly to memes replicate? “Imitation” is often suggested, as in the Wikipedia article. But imitation presupposes something more fundamental: attention. You can’t imitate what you haven’t paid attention to. Attention is meme sex.

So that’s the idea. And if you’re following so far, let’s draw this metaphor out a little more.

Chatting with a friend about YouTube is a case of consensual idea-exchange, analogous to consensual sex. It’s the same for ideas I acquire by reading my blogs or watching a TV show. I was looking for some meme-input, and they provided.

Advertisements are sometimes consensual too, as when people tune in to watch the superbowl ads. But ads often constitute a theft of attention, a non-consensual transmission of ideas. TV advertisements, email spam, billboards, flashing banner ads…they’re all there to steal a little of your attention. The chances of successful replication are lower of course, but the advertiser only needs a few successes to make it worth their while. Not to stretch the analogy too far, but this non-consensual transmission of ideas could aptly be described as a sort of “memetic assault”.

When I lived in New York I heard of a guy who stood at the subway exit every day at rush hour. He’d ask every passing woman if they would have sex with him. Of course, they almost all said no (or worse). He annoyed a lot of people, but he never went home alone. Pop-up advertisers and spammers play the same strategy in meme-space.

There are also cases where the meme replication does not take place. For example, I’m writing this from Germany and have been reminded many times in the last few days how poor my German is. When speaking with folks here I often cannot what they are saying to me. So no matter how much I want their ideas to replicate in me, they just won’t go. Similarly, an advertisement for “Hotels in Frankurt” has a much higher chance of catching my attention (and replicating its ideas in me) when I am actually in market for such a hotel. This is the genius of AdWords and AdSense. They acheive higher meme replication through better meme matchmaking, and without having to resort to the desperate tactics of that guy in the New York subway.

Google is a matchmaker in normal search results too. When you do a search online, you are specifying the types of ideas that you would like to pay attention to. This makes Google into a sort of meme dating service, bringing together willing attention-givers with matched attention-wanters. But it’s not always perfect. (No wonder I feel violated when I click on a search result only to discover a splog!)

An instance of attention, like sex, has male and female roles. (I’m talking of course about the typical biological male/female distinction as per Dawkins.) The idea-spreader (aka the attention reciever) spreads his ideas. The idea-reciever (aka the attention-giver) receives them and, if there is alignment, possibly a new copy is born.

You could draw this analogy much further, but I’ll stop there for now.

So that’s the idea behind  Attention is meme sex.

And if you like this idea, I hope you’ll consider making a copy of it into your own mind.

Today BoingBoing links to a promotional video for a perpetual-motion machine company. Their goal was to mock it and point it out as an example of absurdity. But as I watched it I was thinking, “Here I am paying attention to guys who I think are idiots or con-men. And with the BB link, they’re surely getting a lot more attention.”

Giving attention to folks that you disagree with is an interesting phenomena. For example, I occasionally read some creationist sites and blogs. Sometimes I listen to radio stations that play music I hate. And some years ago when a friend tried to get me into a multilevel marketing thing, I was compelled by my friendship to do a lot of research (e.g. pay a lot of attention) to stuff that was IMHO bullshit.

This is also a challenge for the Outfoxed Lijit system: I think my friends might enjoy the video–who wouldn’t enjoy seeing such an age-old scam being marketed over something as new as Google video? But if I bookmark it, digg it, or give it the ‘ol thumbs-up, could this be construed as an endorsement for the company itself? The semantics of social bookmarking are ambiguous.

The perps on “Cops” are always happy to be shown on TV, even when it’s them being stupid, drunk, high, naked, or all of the above.

If attention is the new currency, is there ever bad attention? Is there such a thing as bad publicity? If we are supposed to “vote with our wallet“, should we also be voting with our attention?

The Imminent Doom of YouTube is a user-made faux-conspiracy documentary about MySpace attempting to take over YouTube. The telling quote comes at the very end when the announcer warns us:

…Only then can we distract enough attention from them [the MySpace plants]. Only then will YouTube survive.

What’s amazing to me is that the 19 year old creator so naturally understands that in the online world, attention equals survival. The more radical notions of Goldhaber’s attention economy will not seem so radical in a few years.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the attention economy lately, so Brad’s excellent post about The Three Constituencies got me thinking about how attention figures into this triad of consumers, publishers, and advertisers.(What he calls subscribers I’ll broaden to “consumers,” since you often receive media from publishers whom you don’t really subscribe to. Watching TV, for example.)

Each constituency has something to give and something it wants:

• Consumers want media which is interesting, funny, relevant, etc. In a word, something salient. They are willing to pay attention if they find something.
• Publishers, if they’re any good, have people paying attention to them. But unless they’re into the starving artist thing, they want money. And they’re willing to give up some of their received attention in exchange for money.
• Lucky for them, advertisers want people to pay attention to their ads. And they are willing to pay Publishers who can deliver that attention.

It looks like this:

	has	wants
consumer	attention	salience
publisher	salience	dollars
advertiser	dollars	attention

Consider our friend Joe watching a TV show.

• Joe wants to be entertained (salience) so he watches (pays attention to) American Idol (Published by NBC).
• NBC wants money, so it shows adverisements to Joe (gives some of his attention to Coke)..
• Coke wants to influence Joe’s behavior (via his attention) so it gives money to NBC in exchange for showing Joe the advertisement.

Of course, the same pattern emerges for subscribing to a blog, or reading a newspaper.
This gives us a certain flow by which each party gets what they want:

consumer

←salience attention→

publisher

attention→ ←dollars

advertiser

From this view, you can see that Google starts by greasing the salience-for-attention exchange, but gets paid by taking a cut of the dollars-for-attention exchange. And the genius of it is that they use the data gained in the first exchange to increase the value of the second exchange: they show ads that are more salient because they know what the consumer was searching for or viewing..

consumer	←salience attention→	publisher	attention→ ←dollars	advertiser
	Google Search		Google AdSense

The final exchange which completes the circle is when the consumer gives money to the advertiser in exchange for stuff. In our example, when Joe goes out and buys a Coke.
Brad’s distinction is rich. I expect to find more nuggets within it.