The idea of the ‘Attention Economy’ is well defined by Alex Iskold at Read/WriteWeb. Companies have always endeavored to find out as much information as they can about their customers in order to improve the services they deliver or in some cases to sell this information to other companies. Information about people has always been a valuable commodity. The Attention Economy is about digging deeper and extracting more detailed information about where people devote their ‘Attention’. The history log of your web browser is a good example of your where your recent attention has been devoted to on the web and it is interesting, and perhaps inevitable, that Google is seeking to make use of this information with its Web History product.

There are already a host of services our there such as StumbleUpon which uses your browsing behavior to recommend sites you might like to visit. Even Last.fm uses your ‘Attention Information’ on your iTunes playlist (how many times you’ve listed to various songs) to create a personalised radio station which is tailored to your particular taste. Particls, which Huw will be reviewing shortly, is another application which is using attention data in a fascinating new way. What all of these services have in common is their use of past attention to predict what you will be interested in now and in the future. This could be extremely powerful in solving problems like information overload and content discovery in the long tail media economy (previously discussed here).

Such information is extremely valuable, and as such there is an effort to standardise the way in which it is stored, therefore making it portable. As a result, the APML (Attention Profiling mark-up language) has sprung up to try to standardise the way that “Attention Information” is formatted. This is certainly a good thing as I feel that the ‘Attention Economy’ really shines when attention information can be shared between services in a meaningful way. However, agreeing on standards and persuading companies to adopt them is notoriously difficult. It will be interesting to see how the effort develops in the coming months, and you can be assured that GizBuzz will be there to cover it!