@seth

(This is a joint blog post from Greg Yardley and myself, that is being published simultaneously on the AttentionTrust.org site)

The initial launch of AttentionTrust.org raised
questions, but did not always provide clear answers. Now, with the
release of the open-source Attention Extension (ATX), the first
attention recorder, we expect more questions to arise. Not all of these
questions have immediate answers; like any young organization, we
sometimes find the answers through practice. To help increase
understanding and spark discussion, the AttentionTrust is featuring
individual perspectives on the organization and its Attention
Extension. The first two are from Seth Goldstein, Chairman of the AttentionTrust, and Greg Yardley,
Product Manager at Root Markets – both were part of the team that put
together the Attention Extension. While Seth and Greg both value the
Attention Extension, they come at it from different perspectives, think
in different ways, and write with different styles; by presenting both
essay simultaneously, they hope to reach a greater audience than either
essay would individually.

GREG YARDLEY:

The AttentionTrust is a non-profit organization that is developing
and encouraging others to develop open source ‘attention recorders,’
devices that will allow their users to capture what they do and
therefore assert some control it. Although later attention recorders
will not be so limited, the first is a Firefox extension that saves the
user’s clickstream, and gives users the option of forwarding on their
clickstreams to services that live up to the AttentionTrust’s high
standards – property, mobility, economy, and transparency. In plain
English, these principles ensure that you know exactly what’s being
recorded about you and how it’s being used, that you own all of that
information, and that you have the right to move it around however you
like, including the right to delete it completely from each service’s
databases. These are not insignificant rights; they’re rarely found
online today.

I worked with the AttentionTrust to help create the Attention
Recorder primarily because I see it as the start of a new platform, a
tool many people can build on top of to create many different types of
value. But I also worked with the AttentionTrust because I see it as a
fundamentally anti-authoritarian, action-oriented organization, and
that appeals to me politically and personally. I appreciate how the
AttentionTrust is willing to act – instead of attempting to concretely
define every aspect of its mission, its founders simply begun, putting
up a rudimentary website and pulling together a talented board of
directors.

Although the organization was criticized for its vague public
statements, it sparked a process of thought and work that wouldn’t have
occurred otherwise. The AttentionTrust could have taken those advisors,
gone to companies with large data repositories and politely tried to
negotiate a little more visibility into how personal data is used.
Instead, it began to produce code.

Released as an alpha today, the AttentionTrust’s Attention Recorder
allows me to keep a copy of my behavior for myself, regaining some
measure of control over it. The Attention Recorder also allows me to
share my clickstream with companies committed to upholding the
principles of the AttentionTrust – which allows me to retain that
control. Clickstreams can tell stories; what I view online is a direct
reflection of my aims, desires, and curiosities. Over time, online
behavior documents both passing interests and long-term projects,
revealing gradual or sudden shifts in mood and behavior. Why would I
entrust such a valuable record to another entity, without at least
retaining a copy for myself?

Now that the open-source Attention Recorder has been released, it’s
my hope that developers will both develop more sophisticated Attention
Recorders and create applications for the Attention Recorder’s users.
There are wonderful things that can be done with even the limited
amount of data sent by the initial Attention Recorder – even I can
think of dozens. If developers create compelling applications that the
AttentionTrust enables through sophisticated Attention Recorders for
them, it’ll give birth to a community – a community where the
indiviudal has more control over their recorded activity and is more
prone to exercise that control. If this community is large enough,
existing organizations will join it. As the community gains momentum
and reaches the tipping point, it will transform our Internet from a
network of largely ignorant data sources to be aggressively mined to
one where individuals are fully-aware participants in two-way
transparent relationships with the services they use. This is a change
I would love to help bring about.

Of course, that’s easier to say than to do. Right now, the
AttentionTrust faces a classic chicken-and-egg problem – the services
that make use of AttentionTrust data don’t yet exist, and the services
don’t yet exist because there’s not enough installed and transmitting
attention recorders to make coding them worthwhile. Yet without an
obvious, compelling reason to initially install the recorders, there’s
never going to be a large enough user base to make coding a service
worth it. Luckily, there are organizations out there committed to
creating applications for AttentionTrust data – my company, Root
Markets, is one of them. And there are compelling reasons to start
using the AttentionTrust recorder now, on every instance of Firefox you
run, even in the complete absence of applications. I’m running the
Attention Recorder now for two reasons – my fear of lock-in and my fear
of forgetting.

Lock-in initially seems like a good problem to have, because it
results when services begin to get personalization right. In order to
do that, services must make records, so they can see how one user
differs from another and adjust the content they show accordingly.
Today, I don’t think any one service has mastered personalization –
many are useful, but when a new service comes along, we can hop over to
it, use it for a short period of time, and get what it has to offer
without too much delay. Sure, the services we used in the past know a
bit more about us than the new service will, but since the old services
weren’t using that information in any particularly in depth way, it’s
no great loss. But that may not be the case a year or two from now – I
expect it won’t be the case a year or two from now. By then, services
on the web should be sophisticated enough to give us quality
personalization. And at that point, moving from one service to another
begins to carry a switching cost – when your old services get to know a
lot about you, any new services you want to try will seem pretty dumb.

When personal vs. impersonal feels like online vs. offline,
individuals will become less and less likely to try new services, which
will stifle innovation and giving the first movers a tremendous
advantage. Unless, of course, an individual could transfer all of the
information recorded by their old service to a newer services. If we
could simply move our information wholesale from one service to the
other, it’d greatly reduce switching costs, allowing us to decide based
on features rather than seniority. The Attention Recorder allows me to
build up a store of my information today, which I’m hoping will help me
avoid lock-in in the future.

I’m also running the Attention Recorder because I’m afraid of
forgetting. When I studied Russian history, some time ago, I was struck
by just how little remained of people, only a few centuries after their
deaths. Only scraps of documentation survive, if any; many individuals
have simply ceased to exist. Provided I take care of the data, the
Attention Recorder can serve as a record of me, allowing future
generations to reconstruct how I thought and when I thought it. Perhaps
I’ll be a good Master’s thesis a couple of centuries down the road. Or
– more importantly – perhaps I’ll still be around in a couple of
centuries. Ray Kurzweill raises the possibility in his The Singularity is Near,
a book that’s been on my mind recently – and in case he’s right, and my
lifespan is dramatically longer than my ancestors’, I want to make sure
I remember who I am and where I came from in the centuries ahead. I
wish I could record it all; what I see, what I hear, what I feel. I
can’t, yet, although I’m confident I’ll be able to someday, and I’m
hopeful I’ll be able to make use of those recorded surroundings some
day after that. For now, my clickstream is a good start.

I do anticipate criticisms of the Attention Recorder. I expect that
it’ll be called spyware, since it shares some functionality with
spyware – it can watch what you do online, and it can transmit that
information to a third party. However, the Attention Recorder always
remains under the individual’s control. It’s obvious when it’s on and
when it’s off – it adds large icons to the browser. It gives the user
the ability to pause with a click, add domains to a non-recordable
blacklist, and block all pages using the secure https protocol. It
allows the user to send their clickstreams only to services approved by
the AttentionTrust, which guarantees the user will retain control over
the clickstream and how it is used. The Attention Recorder is only
spyware if it’s possible to spy on oneself.

I suspect that Attention Recorders may actually provide solutions to
the problems of mass surveillance; as storage grows ever cheaper and
databases grow more sophisticated, we are approaching the point where
it will be possible to record almost everything about almost
everything, a recording totality that could completely transform our
society. While organizations and individuals have been sorting out how
to do this, little concern has been shown for who will do this, and who
will benefit from it – the answer by default becomes ‘whoever manages
to get there first.’ I suspect that surveillance will continue to come
in ever-increasing amounts; the value of the data gathered is simply
too great. However, who surveills and how is still undetermined. A
half-century’s worth of Orweillian dystopias have assumed the
government will reach the recording totality first – or a corporation
that has become the government – and the results have not been pleasant
for the individual. The AttentionTrust offers a potential alternative
to this scenario. If recording of our actions is coming, it should be
done by us as individuals, for our benefit, with our knowledge, and
under our control. The arrogance of governments and corporations who
treat our histories as theirs must be checked; the AttentionTrust may
be the tool that lets us check it.

SETH GOLDSTEIN:

GESTURE PRICE:  ATX

"Remember to remember me,
standing still in your past
floating fast, like a hummingbird"

His goal in life was to be an echo.

Wilco

For the past two months I have been trying to understand the relationship between the following two questions of attention:

1. Data cost? What is the actual cost of producing personal
   data, and how does this add up to be what we lose when we lose our
   identity online?
2. Gesture price? What price could you get for a clear
   signal of your undivided attention. What do I have to do to prove to
   you that I am genuinely interested in what you are telling me, selling
   me or otherwise?

The relationship of data cost to gesture price creates a new exchange ratio for establishing the value of your attention.

We started AttentionTrust.org about six months ago to encourage
Internet users that they ought to pay attention to the value of what
they pay attention to online.  In so far as it was not something that was recognized explicitly
anywhere, we simply claimed victory over our data and began to
celebrate the win with a bunch of other people who felt the same way
about their own data.

The web site we put up was nothing more than a declaration of
principles, a list of people involved, and a way to sign up for a badge
that you can display as agreeing to the principles and joining the
community. There was no distinction between individual and company, as
both were recognized to be producers and consumers of attention data.

Then the blog community responded with a strange brew of loud
endorsements and loud disses. We realized that we had focused on an
important problem and got to work on a potential solution. The fruit of
this labor is ATX: the AttentionExtension. ATX is the first
open-source, opt-in Internet clickstream recorder. We released this and
an associated developer kit on Wednesday October 5, 2005 at a public
board meeting for AttentionTrust at the Web 2.0 Conference in San
Francisco.

1. Consumers: For those of you that pay attention online,
   congratulations, you can now spy on yourself! The best defense against
   spyware is a good offense. We have adware, spyware, malware,
   researchware, all of which are being done to us. Why not MyWare? ATX is
   the first of a number of AttentionRecorders that we are planning to
   help consumers control and communicate their electronic trails. Go here
   and install a simple Firefox extension that will allow you to turn a
   switch on and off to record all of your clicks. You can choose whether
   this information is sent to your own computer or any other server that
   is AttentionTrust certified. The record includes every url you visit
   along with a time stamp, redirect and cookie info.
2. Developers: For developers that want to invent new
   Web services based on actual historical clickstream data, you can now
   spend your time designing killer personalized applications, not
   worrying about business development deals with corporations. The ATX
   toolkit offers you a set of scripts that allows any
   AttentionTrust-certified server to collect clicks from consumers that
   wish to provide them.

We face a classic bootstrap challenge with ATX: consumers won’t
invest the effort to record their attention unless there are killer
apps that provide tangible value; developers won’t invest the effort to
design killer apps unless there are enough consumers to make it worth
their while. I do not know how we will overcome this challenge. What I
do know is that our intentions are authentic and come from a deep
empathy for both consumers and developers of Web 2.0. What we lack in
terms of adoption now, we will make up later based on our transparency.

Credit:  ATX was designed by Stan James, inventor of Outfoxed which is a trusted community service based on shared browsing commentary.  Stan had the full support of the AttentionTrust board
including Mary who drafted the privacy policy, and Nick who weighed in
technically; as well as significant development support from Greg,
Mike, Josh, and Tony at Root Markets, the company I recently founded to develop commercial applications of the emerging attention ecosystem.      

DATA COST:  MEMEX

It has been 60 years since Vannevar Bush published his concept of
the Memex in his article As We May Think in the July 1945 issue of the
Atlantic Monthly magazine. Without the benefit of being able to refer
to personal computers, the Internet, Google or del.icio.us, Bush
nevertheless articulates a vision for Web 2.0 mash-ups as clear and
compelling as anything coming out of the blogosphere today:

A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be
continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be
consulted… This is a much larger matter than merely the extraction of
data for the purposes of scientific research; it involves the entire
process by which man profits from by his inheritence of acquired
knowledge… Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of
materials available to him. And his trails do not fade. Wholly new
forms of encyclopedia will appear, ready-made with a mesh of
associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the
memex and there amplified… There is a new profession of trail
blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful
trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritence
from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record,
but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were
erected. Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces,
stores, and consults the record of the race… Presumably, man’s spirit
should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze
more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a
civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more
fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not
merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited
memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the
privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have
immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if
they prove important.

Bush’s presumption that "Man’s spirit should be elevated if he can
better review his shady past and analyze more completely and
objectively his present problems." resonates with the agenda of
AttentionTrust. I recently read about Amazon’s 10th anniversary
celebration. I was so impressed by the company’s success over time at
leveraging such a massive amount of product and people information.
What I didnt recognize, however, was that I was celebrating a key
anniversary simultaneously: my 10th year as an Amazon customer. And
what do I have to show for it? A lot of great books for starters. What
does Amazon have to show for it? A fair amount of my money over the
years. The symmetry quickly breaks down if you consider how much
incremental enterprise value Amazon has generated based on the record
of my attention (ie my browsing and purchase history) in the context of
other consumers; I however lack an equivalent means of aggregating this
and other records to create a similar increase in personal value.

We are clicking away, constantly, more and more, deeper into sites
through sponsored links and affiliate redirects. We download things
that talk to other things on our computer about us, and we hope this
data does not get connected to our user names and passwords on other
servers that might connect to our credit and reputation. The data
produced by what we pay attention to exists in a lawless environment
that encourages companies to do almost anything they can to increase
what they know about you to generate more value out of our expressions
of interest. Besides, even if we were more careful, how could we keep
up with our own records? Our attention is fractured in a way that it
never has before, tempted each minute by blackberries, cel phones, and
assorted other electronic screens. More and more bloggers are now
ignoring the same RSS readers that they are predicting will gain mass
market adoption any day now. To what extent does information overload
contribute to the surge in attention deficit disorder?

Let us imagine for a moment that there was a transparent, passive
means of recording information about every site we visit, every form we
fill out, every email we send, every instant message we receive, every
call we make. Most of us would acknowledge the extent to which we have
exposed ourselves to different people in different ways in recent
years, and yet few of us invest the effort to maintain these "trails."
Why should we after all? Instead, we have quietly abdicated these
memories to multiple 3rd parties that we hope won’t have a broad enough
picture to relate these personal data fragments to a single electronic,
legal, economic identity- otherwise known as me.

At approximately the same time that Bush released his essay on the
Memex, Norbert Weiner issued the following warning in his original
introduction to Cybernetics (or Control and Communication in the Animal
and the Machine):

There are those who hope that the good of a better
understanding of man and society which is offered by this new field of
work may anticipate and outweigh the incidental contribution we are
making to the concentration of power (which is always concentrated, by
its very conditions of existence, in the hands of the most
unscrupulous).

Similarly today, the same Internet technology that has liberated us
from paper, floppy disks and wires has contributed an unparalleled
concentration of power (in the form of information about our trails).
It is convenient to assume we have the appropriate checks and balances
in place to prevent anything really bad from happending, and yet
history has continually proven "hope" to be a poor defense against the
will of the "unscrupulous."

Most people carry within them a personal touchstone of evil against
which they can distinguish good from bad. For me, it is the stories my
Nana Kass would not share with me of the horrors of her experience in
the Nazi concentration camps. There is no stronger reminder for me of
the dangers of concentration of power in the hands of the unscrupulous
than my memory of her pursed lips. You can only imagine my interest
when I got the following note in August from Jeremy Norman, a superb
collector, curator and dealer of early technology history, from whom I
had just purchased an original edition of the 1945 Atlantic Monthly:
"Note that the particular issue of the Atlantic Monthly, very rare in
its original wrappers, also contains some articles of Holocaust
interest." When I finally received the issue, I opened to the following
article:

For the Record:  Buchenwald, by Lt. Col. Charles R. Codman:
Senior aide to General Patton, Lt. Col. Charles R. Codman was one of
the first American officers to see Buchenwald. In his letter to the
Editor, Colonel Codman says: "I have written it only because I thought
I ought to. I don’t like horrors any more than you do. It probably
won’t be believed- even with the dozens of photographs I had taken.
There it is- take it or leave it. Leave it, and there will be another
war in ten years.

I was struck then, and continue to be, by the connection between
Bush’s celebration of the Memex as a recording device and the
cautionary title of Lt. Col. Codman’s letter which starts: "For the
Record."

Perhaps the ultimate cost of not remembering our data trails is far
worse than I had imagined. Is it conceivable that our carefree
disenfranchisement from the attention data we produce could, left
unchecked, lead to some sort of Datacaust? One only has to read through
the testimonies of those who have had their identities stolen to
realize that this is more than an idle threat. The more we express
ourselves electronically, the more residues we leave of ourselves in
the network that maintain our identity but not our control. Whereas in
the offline world, biology, gravity and optics tend to hold us
together, our digital shadows dont always move with us. Pieces often
fall off and become lodged in other systems that we don’t control.
These systems typically belong to companies that sell Internet media
and consumer data. This includes the nasty adware, spyware, and email
spammers; as well as the hundreds of thousands of legitimate
advertisers buying keywords on search engines and purchasing personal
information from credit agencies and other data brokers. Companies are
selling our data to other companies for billions and billions of
dollars each year, frequently without our knowledge much less our
consent.

I acknowledge that the servers that I interact with deserve a copy of the record of my attention. 

But so do I. 

CURIOUS GEORG

In 1907, German Sociologist Georg Simmel wrote his seminal work the
Philosophy of Money. In it, he describes money as a peculiar
abstraction of the intellect. But he acknowledges that despite its
abstract nature, the determination of monetary value establishes a
reality similar to that of the introduction of pocket watches:

The conceivable elements of action become objectively
and subjectively calculable rational relationships and in so doing
progressively eliminate the emotional reactions and decisions which
only attach themselves to the turning points of life, to the final
purposes…. The mathematical character of money imbues the
relationship of the elements of life with a precision, a reliability in
the determination of parity and disparity, an unambiguousness in
agreements and arrangements in the same way as the general use of
pocket watches has brought about a similar effect in daily life. Like
the determination of abstract value by money, the determination of
abstract time by clocks provides a system for the most detailed and
definite arrangements and measurements that imparts an otherwise
unattainable transparency and calculability to the contents of life.

Time, Money, Attention.