At the end of last December I thought this year would bring some serious innovation with “Attention” online. It hasn’t happened. Not yet, anyway.
I don’t pretend to be an expert on APML but I do know that it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere significant as it stands. I’m not sure people know what to do with it, though I think that something like it could unlock a huge change online. Attention is a very big deal–ask any media company. It also has the opportunity to make us much more productive.
How it would work: Your attention would be recorded
I started thinking of Attention a bit like “Theme Clouds.” Whereas tag clouds are words I manually use to bookmark content, a Theme Cloud would be very different.
- They would be automatic. I wouldn’t have to do anything. I’d opt in via my browser, email client, phone, and operating system and those things would just record what I was reading or writing. They would also be trendable. I could watch a movie of my Theme Cloud and see which words got bigger/smaller over time.
- I could pause or turn off the service when I didn’t want it recording what I was consuming.
- The data would be automatically put into contextual themes. It would know that “interviews” was part of my Agency search and be able to parse the difference between “interviews” for my Agency search and “interviews” for my Business Development efforts.
- It could tell which themes were for work and which were for my personal attention. And this data could be offered as an API for other applications to plug into. Exercise.
The 5 Futures of Attention
1. Retrace my steps.
The most basic application of this new API would be that I could see my history with context. I could get a sense of the trends of my consumption. I could have a macro view of which things were important to me, when. Think history with context. For example, I could start looking for “Planning” over the last 2 months and it would show me links to all the work content related to Business Development.
2. Share it.
Once my attention is collected I can choose to share it. I could make it open and available to everyone or just certain people. I could make parts of it available, say my work attention to all/some co-workers but none of my personal attention. Or I could make all of it available to everyone within my social network whether that’s at work or not.
3. Much higher quality connections.
By sharing my Attention theme cloud, folks would know which themes were important to me and engage with me in more appropriate ways. They would know that right now I’m pretty focused on “Exercise” which would give my social network more information. They could decide to proactively share their insight or information on Exercise or they might find what I’m reading or paying attention to valuable because they too are interested in Exercise. This could help sort out the most relevant times to engage with me. It could also help me networking with more appropriate people who have similar interests based on what they’re reading/writing.
4. Overlay my attention onto other things.
Attention would be a powerful addition the online world we already use. Thanks to attention data, I’d love to take my new and improved social network and filter my RSS reader based on what certain people are reading. Or even better, if I’m on Amazon.com, it would be very valuable to know which people within my social network have also looked at or purchased specific items. The same is true with content at work. I’d love to know who else is paying attention to the same things that I am.
5. New media models
Media is in the attention game. The old way of getting attention was to own the property (like a magazine) and then try to get as many people to read it as possible so that they could charge advertisers for your attention. But our attention is much more fragmented now and mostly falls out of the old advertising network grips. I would imagine that people would/could opt-in to be reached in more meaningful ways by use of Attention. This would require providing some level of value (free internet access, more relevant communication or some other value) for consumers to intice them to participate. No doubt, if media companies could re-model themselves to capitalize on this level of Attention, we’d see a very different Media industry.
