More Details on Attention Trust

I’m sitting in the Attention Trust public board meeting at the Web 2.0 conference and getting more details on their announcements discussed below.

Everything is centered around the Attention Trust Recorder Firefox extension (they’re calling it ATX). Once installed, if you turn it on, it monitors your click stream. ATX also tells you if the site you are on is Attention Trust approved, and has controls to turn the recorder on and off.

The data can be stored locally and/or shared with any number of trusted parties if you so choose. Attention Trust insists that companies using the data adhere to the Attention Trust principles.

This information is incredibly valuable, of course, particularly when aggregated with others. Virtually any online company will be interested in this data, and will invent creative ways to incentivize customers to share their attention data with them.

Search engines are the obvious example…knowing what sitex you’ve been to, and how long you’ve stayed, is extraordinarily useful in creating more relevant search results.

So once again, the basic flow:

1. companies agree to principles (users own their own data and attention)
2. consumers download recorder (firefox extension) that tracks clickstream
3. recorder can be turned on or off at any time
4. consumers may share data with any or no approved companies
5. companies will incentivize users to share data