Who owns the information about where you go, what you look at, or do, or for how long on the internet?  The information's valuable. It allows advertisers to target you. it allows outsiders to understand your interest and personalities. It means someone get to know you; either individually (follow the clicks) or as a class, (people who visit Amazon, Perceptric and the New Yorker) And beyond the current cookie counter operations if we get into understanding that you spend a hour at Perceptric, and an hour at the New Yorker, and no time at NASCAR, we get a clue to what makes you tick. See now? Pure Gold.

Attention Trust.org launched to deal with this issue. The organization wants internet users to own their own data set about attention. Naturally, Wednesday, Google announced they were moving into the field. Why not? They want to sell highly and precisely targeted ads. They won't be the last to try and take the field either.

Some people will care passionately about this, others not. But there have been great discussion pieces including at Transparent Bundles , ZDNet, Scobleizer (Microsoft viewpoint) and others.

There has been precisely nothing in any of the major media outlets. Yet right now, attention is the cutting edge of where the web will go, how it will develop, who will pay for it and what service we will or won't see.

This entry was posted on November 5, 2005 at 1:53 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Intellectual Property Main Page by Richard McKinnon No Comments Yet