My Own Pirate Radio

In a recent post I listed several social issues related to the so-called attention economy. One of these is deciding how to manage the digital record — the “breadcrumb trail” — of your attention while online. For example, Amazon knows what you purchased through them, NetFlix knows what movies you’ve rented, and all the big search engines have a complete log of every query ever issued from every IP address, together with the search results clicked on. (Yikes.) As Jon Udell writes, at least some people believe this status quo is unacceptable.

The organization AttentionTrust has taken it on themselves to give consumers control over this digital record. AttentionTrust envisions a world where polite online services make all “attention” data transparently accessible to you the consumer in a standard format, so that you can read it, move it around, and use applications that manipulate the data in some useful way. They even imagine you being able to rent access to this record to marketers, publishers, and so on.

Well, I’d love to have more control over my digital breadcrumbs, but there’s about a snowball’s chance in hell of getting today’s big online dataminers to voluntarily help out. Amazon, Yahoo!, AOL, Claria, Microsoft, Google, TelCo’s… these companies are all in the business of analyzing their users’ habits and then using that proprietary knowledge to (1) sell behaviorally targeted advertisements, (2) build a feedback loop to improve the quality of their service (e.g. tuning search result ranking), and (3) add new features (e.g. Amazon’s Gold Box). And that’s in decreasing priority order. To get the raw data you’d have to pry it out of their cold dead hands, or club it out of them with legal regulations, as is happening now with privacy laws. For Claria in particular, the user behavior log is their business. No, I don’t think they want to play data warehouse show and tell.

More realistic is the idea of collecting this data yourself through a browser plugin like Outfoxed. That would work. But once you have it, what do you do with it, and who do you trust with it? Frankly I’m terrified of publishing my entire attention record somewhere for all the world to see and interpret. Bad Idea.

A not-so-bad idea is sharing a watered-down subset of data in anonymized, aggregated form. For starters, you could create the ultimate Neilsen Net rating by revealing which web sites get the most eyeball time (dwell time, not just clicks). This is a research goldmine. Beware spam, of course.

I’m eager to see where this one goes.

P.S. If you’re logging everything anyway, you might as well go beyond the online/offline boundary. What about recording my application execution history and window focus history; my mouse movements including not just clicks but also hover, drag, drop; the location of my mobile phone as reported by my TelCo; etc.? All this and more can be done. Double-yikes.

P.P.S. In this Gillmore Gang podcast, Seth Goldstein quoted Josh Schacter coining a particularly apt phrase describing his online service del.icio.us: “crystallized attention”. Yes, exactly! All these online services have massive logs that represent crystallized attention.