I've been explaining this to others based on a guess of an understanding so now lets see how much I got correct and what I'm still needing to learn.
The Long Tale.
Steve Gillmor: Waiting for Attention... Or Something like it.
Background: < a href="http://www.firesigntheatre.com/albums/album.php?album=wfte">Waiting For The Electrician Or Someone Like Him, by Firesign Theatre, with which Steve was once associated.
It's a nice long post about attention.xml, a new spec Steve is driving. The gist:
What does matter is a pool of attention metadata owned by the users. This open cloud of reputational presence and authority can be mined by each group of constituents. Users can barter their attention in return for access to full content, membership priviliges, and incentives for strategic content. Vendors can build on top of that cloud of data with their own special saucethe newbie crowd of MyYahoo, the pacesetter early adopters of Diller/Ask/Bloglines, the social attention farm of RoJo, and Google¹s emerging Office service components orchestrated by the core GMail inforouter. And the media, which now includes publishers, analysts, researches, rating services, advertisers, sponsors, and underwriters, can use the data as a giant inference engine for leveraging the fat middle of the long tail.
With so much going for it, how and where is attention vulnerable? It¹s vulnerable to being pigeonholed as an automated artificially intelligent approach to personalization. In my view (remembering that this is my idea, and the problem I wanted to solve) attention metadata is useful in service of the reputational filter of the people and ideas I and the people I track are interested in. This is not about merely reorganizing my feed data based on my patterns of acquisition, but the cumulative weighting of the minds and interests represented by those feeds and items.
I love it when journalists take the lead in solving, and not just reporting on, problems. Steve is a great model here. In fact, I'm trying to follow his lead on the subject of Identity. (One sample.)
[The Doc Searls Weblog]
