Attention Trust Recorder

AttentionTrust (profile) announced a number of updates to its service today.

The underlying philosophy of this nonprofit corporation is described in Seth GoldStein and Greg Yardley’s post on the Attention Trust blog.

In addition to a new look and feel to the site, AttentionTrust has also releaseed the Attention Trust Recorder, a Firefox extension that records your browsing history and saves it both to your desktop and to the Attention Trust service, where you can choose to share parts of it with trusted service providers.

From the FAQs:

Q: What does the Attention Recorder save and share?

A: For each web page you visit, the Attention Recorder will save the web page’s URL, the web page’s title, the HTTP response code, and whether that web page read or wrote any cookies to were cookies. (The contents of those cookies we don’t record.)

You can see exactly what the Attention Recorder sends by selecting Tools > Attention Recorder Options, selecting the Approved Services tab, and then selecting ‘Local Storage’ as an Attention Service. The same information the Attention Recorder sends will then be written to your hard drive. For a more technical discussion of the Attention Recorder, see http://www.attentiontrust.org/extension/spec.

Q: How do I select which Approved Services to send my information to?

A: Your initial selection can be made from this page – by selecting an Approved Service from the list and downloading the extension from that Approved Service’s Attention Trust page, you’ll automatically begin sending your information to that service. In the future, you can edit which Attention Banks receive your information by going to Tools > Attention Recorder Options, selecting the Approved Services tab, and then changing your selections.

Steve Gillmor will be talking more about Attention Trust today at a 1:30 Web 2.0 Conference session. Updates then.