Alex Barnett, always thinking about attention issues (I know how that is, Alex) has posted 20 thoughts on Attention. The most important is #4:

“From the customer’s perspective, the future value of Attention data does not lie in its monetization potential. At best this will turn out to be few dollars per year per user.”

I think this is a fact that Steve Gillmor missed when he was first agitating about attention; monetization seemed to be the key to attention to him, and I think it’s caused attention to start out headed in the wrong direction. In fact, I think that overall attention adoption has suffered as a result.

I think the only AttentionTrust approved service right now, Root Vaults, suffers the same problem. It’s model is centered on the dollars and cents economy around attention, and it feels (to me, at least) that it’s mostly about lead generation, and less about my attention data’s value to me. To be fair, Root.net seems to be adding new features and they do offer some services with regard to attention data, but the overall feel of the effort isn’t centered enough around my data and too much around the other players in the attention pool. I have a few other thoughts about Root.net that I’ll try and post later, but the long/short of it is that now that I can collect my own attention data (using the AttentionTrust toolkit as a starting point), I’m not sending my clickstream to my root vault.

Alex asks for brutal feedback, and I’m not sure if it’s possible brutally to agree (since Alex and I mostly seem to see eye-to-eye on attention issues), but here are my comments:

1. Yep. But there is something new in being able to collect my own.
2. Not necessarily, but even so, there’s nothing inherently wrong with cookies a long as they have a compact privacy policy and you trust the source. However that’s really the key. And I don’t think cookie destruction has risen that much - if you’re at all like me, think about how many times you probably use the “Remember me” checkbox.
3. Yes! So where are the other tools to aggregate all that stuff? Nowhere yet, and we have to start somewhere
4. see above
5. true. In fact I don’t think it’ll lure many people at all into the attention market. Let’s just stop talking about it and starting talking about the really important stuff.
6. of course
7. more and more every day, thankfully. Hopefully the AttentionTrust can help push the envelope on that as well.
8. I’m not so sure of this one yet. Maybe someday, but Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are doing pretty darn well collecting our data and doing as they please with it and not many folks are screaming about it. This will take years to change.
9. eventually. not now.
10. probably so, and that’s what may move the mountain for points 9 and 10. Especially so if we demand that they do so.
11. yes
12. eventually people will care about this. not many do right now.
13. see # 10
14. Yes. ID solutions such as LID may help with this eventually, allowing one overarching identity that can present different facets in different contexts, but we all wear different hats and are interested in different things when wearing each. These need to be distiguishable somehow.
15. when you get right down to it, everything is attention data. Jamais Cascio’s ideas about the participatory panopticon are in play here - we will eventually capture just about everything.
16. too soon to tell, but probably correct.
17. yes, but I desperately wish we could follow Dave Winer’s thoughts on formats here. Attention data formats are already out of hand, the more so when we think about our OPML Blogrolls as attention data. Too late to “fix”, I think, so interoperability and conversion tools will be key.
18. I don’t agree with the “customers won’t care” philosophy. Underlying formats affect what’s possible on top of them and as customers choose what services give them the features they want they will be choosing a format. They may not know it, and they may not care what it’s called, and they almost certainly won’t even want to know, but the formats will matter to them. Formats matter.
    I think an example is called for here. If my wife wants to start knowing what she’s paying attention to but wants it to be weighted by whether or not she rated it highly or not, a format that allows for rating items is essential. She won’t think about the format itself, but she’ll choose her service based upon what the format it chooses will allow her to do. “Customers don’t care about formats” only tells part of the story.
19. yup.
20. good list. I’m sure there are more. What about email? My TV “subscription list”? My grocery list? It’s everywhere. Now when can I start collecting all of that?

These are just my fast and loose responses (a fitting response to Alex’s partially random list). There are a few other things revolving around attention that I’ve seen but haven’t gotten around to writing on, but unfortunately (as far as I can see) relatively little in the month that I’ve been taking a break from it.

Bonus link: Oliver Thylmann has some thoughts.