The Attention Economy: A Framework for Measurement, Transparency and Trust in the Internet Age
August 29th, 2007 by Chris
The key factor in the digital media age is the allocation of attention. In a recent blog post on ReadWrite Web - “The Attention Economy: An Overview”, author Alex Iskold provides an interesting framework we’d like to discuss. In a reverse market, where users determine the design of products and services on demand, it becomes critical to decouple user information from the services accessed. Clearly, the Internet is exploding with new services in 2006 and 2007. How can users keep up with the flood of information? The user’s attention is scarce. Users don’t want to update their information separately for each Online service. Users don’t want their data being held hostage.
We suggest a framework around user attention in three steps: measurement, transparency and trust. Considering measurement, it is helpful to separate explicit from implicit information. Explicit information is determined by the willful user actions on a site: bookmarks, recommendations, friends lists, rankings, votes. Implicit information is the information derived from the click stream of users interacting with a site, as well as the semantic neighborhood they navigate in, i.e. similar books, videos, photos, songs, people. To represent the explicit and implicit behavior of users accurately, without duplication, conflicts and gaps, it would be necessary to centralize user information with a neutral third party. Otherwise, a smart model of aggregating decentralized information around i.e. OpenID could be feasible as well.
The third requirement is the element of trust. As product and service providers access the digital vault of user information, they will be assigned a trust metric, similar to a credit rating with banks. Thereby, users are in control of who accesses their profile information, when, where, and finally how this information is used. Most corporate web sites sport a so-called “Privacy Policy”, but this does not extend transparently to explicit and implicit user information recorded. What we need is an umbrella effort of the major Online service providers!
Attention is one of the key issues discussed at the Media in Transition conference, with this year’s strong focus on social media and digital rights: social network pioneers, seasoned marketing and strategy experts, Web 2.0 innovators and digital rights trailblazers present in four compact panel sessions on the future of media.