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!

Just as they’ve released their quarterly earnings report, Google sneakily launched a new feature today, “Web History”. Offering a web-based alternative to your browsers similar feature, Web History aims to organize what you visit into a concise and easily browsable archive of data.

The feature appeared for me in a small box on Google’s search results and I’m presuming this is where the feature will see its search integration. I’m too paranoid to install it (privacy concerns) however it looks like an intriguing idea from both ends (user and Google). I’m frequently losing websites that I visited earlier in the day or week; sometimes even months after visiting a page I’ll go back and try to find the page in question. Google is looking to eliminate this problem by creating a navigable database of everything you visit, and by throwing Google’s famous search on top of it they are looking to make your net archeology a bit easier.

A similar feature to this was implemented in Google Desktop, allowing users to search through their web history. It is likely that we will see a merging of these two features in the future to prevent redundancy, however Google hasn’t given any word yet. One feature that has been lost (or as they say, renamed) is Search History, the functionality of which is now present in Web History.

I applaud Google for trying to make users’ lives easier, at the same time though we have to wonder what Google is doing with this data. Storing all the world’s information isn’t the most profitable business and Google has ads to make up for this, however it surprises me that ads will continue to cover for these side ventures that take focus away from the original mission of search. I don’t want to suggest Google as an Orwellian Big Brother, however they must be fast approaching some government organizations with the ability to find out about people!

Ultimately Web History is an interesting addition to the Google suite of tools, however I won’t be enabling it. I’m a bit too paranoid (and too forgetful for those times I may want it disabled).

Google has just announced that they have acquired Tonic Systems, a company which has already been developing in this area, with the aim of releasing in the summer. According to a post on the Google Blog (incidentally by Sam Schillace, who we interviewed previously for the podcast):

We’ll soon be welcoming a new addition to the Google Docs & Spreadsheets family: presentations.

This is no surprise; they are building a comprehensive online office suite, and presentations were always going to be an integral part of that. As Sam put it in the post, presentations are well suited to collaboration.

It just made sense to add presentations to the mix; after all, when you create slides, you’re almost always going to share them.

I disagree with Arrington. He does not believe Schmidt’s comment at the Web 2.0 Expo that he does not believe that Google Office competes with Microsoft’s product is genuine. I do think the comment is genuine; Google really does see their product as a collaboration tool, rather than a traditional MS Office equivalent. They’ve taken the very sensible view that rather than create a rubbish traditional office suite by using a technology not really appropriate, they will create a product that does one thing, collaboration, extremely well, without trying to compete against Microsoft, whose desktop application will always be able to provide more features.

I’m sure the dream of most of the founders of Web 2.0 companies today is being bought by Google; famously Google acquired YouTube late last year for $1.65bn. From the other perspective, the acquisition of startups can allow Google to move into new areas and develop current activities. I thought it would be interesting to write a post with a couple of my acquisition targets, if I were entrusted with the Goog’s billions.

FeedBurner
If I were Google, FeedBurner would be pretty high on my list of priorities. FeedBurner is a free feed analytics tool, which GizBuzz and most other ‘serious’ blogs use to see how many people are subscribing to their RSS feed and reading their content. FeedBurner works by reprocessing your feed, and if it has enough subscribers, it gives you the option to sell adverts in your feed, through the FeedBurner Advertising Network (FAN). So, whilst initially FeedBurner appears that it is a tool for publishers, in reality it is an advertising company. What does that remind you of? Google.

Google looks like a search company, but is actually an advertising company. As such, it is always looking for more places to stick its adverts, and more ways to help advertisers measure how those ads are performing. FeedBurner is a perfect fit, as it has access to far more inventory in RSS feeds than Google has. Google could simply incorporate FAN into their Adsense programme, and keep FeedBurner as a tool for blog publishers to manage and measure their feeds. I recently wrote why I think negotiations may be happening already between FB and Google.

Pluggd
Pluggd is a podcast directory. However, that’s not what the exciting part of their technology is. They recently released a search technology for podcasts called HearHere (demo and information), which allows you to select a podcast episode and enter a search term. It will then produce a heatmap showing where that term is being spoken about on the podcast, which enables you to go straight to the relevant part of a podcast, finding the relevant information quickly.

An increasing trend around at the moment is that of podcasting, and a vast amount of information is being published in audio files to the internet. Google prides itself on indexing and searching information on the internet. At the moment, however, Google can’t see inside those audio files. This will become more important going forward, and it is a problem that must be solved. Pluggd’s technology goes a long way towards solving it, and does it in an innovative and useful way. It would be a great fit as Google currently has no (published) technology in this area. I also guess that Pluggd would be fairly cheap, as it hasn’t got much of a network effect going and isn’t even funded yet.

The Official Google Blog has announced a new feature in Google Maps called My Maps.

It is described as:

…a new feature that makes it quick and easy to create your own custom Google Maps just by pointing and clicking. You can add placemarks, draw lines and shapes, and embed text, photos and videos — all using a simple drag and drop interface.

Developers have been able to do this kind of thing using the Google Maps API for some time, but this is the first step Google are taking to make this kind of customisation available to the average user within the web interface.

After going into Google Maps, you simply click on the My Maps tab on the left and you have the option to create a new map. After signing in with a Google Account, you can then quite easily go about marking places on the map with pushpins, draw lines and add shapes.

It’s quite a nice feature, but I can’t help thinking that all it is just bringing one of the features of Google’s desktop Google Earth client to the web interface. With Google Earth, you can already create your own custom maps and add your own placemarks. Your places are then saved on your computer in the KML format.

The real difference between the Google Earth mapping tools and the new My Map feature of Google Maps is that Maps saves your data on Google’s servers and binds it to your Google Account, whereas Earth stores data on your computer.

One thing that does irritate me slightly is that you can only export Public maps to KML format so that you can then import them into Google Earth. Unlisted maps don’t have any export features as far as I can see.

Still, it is quite nice to be able to make maps on the fly from anywhere, not just computers where Google Earth is installed and to be able to share them with others more easily.

In case you haven’t already realised, it is the 1st of April again – and of course, that means it’s time for some silly news stories to appear in my RSS reader. I’ve selected three of my favourites that I’ve seen around the web.

(more…)

Google have just posted on their official blog about ‘improving their privacy practices’.

One of these things involves so-called ‘anonymising’ their logs, which apparently involves:

We will change some of the bits in the IP address in the logs as well as change the cookie
information. We’re still developing the precise technical methods and approach to this, but we
believe these changes will be a significant addition to protecting user privacy.

Up until now, Google have just kept their logs for as long as they wanted – and in fact that isn’t going to change here. What will change is that 18-24 months afterwards, they will remove bits of the IP address and cookie information such that data won’t necessarily be tracable to one user any more.

Our engineers are already busy working out the technical details, and we hope to implement this new data policy over the coming months (and within a year’s time). We’ll communicate more as we work out these details, but for now, we wanted you to know that we’re working on this additional step to strengthen your privacy.

You can read a bit more in-depth about exactly what this anonymsing step is and involves in this PDF document.

So what is this? A PR stunt by Google to try and shake off some of the ‘evilness’ they’ve acquired in people’s minds (Google.cn, anyone?) or is a genuine attempt to try and protect Google’s users.

I think it’s mostly the latter. Google have been stubborn in the face of subpoenas before and this move would mean that it would be more difficult for legal processes to get their hands on data, but the time restriction also means that Google can do what they want with the data (and it’s also a compromise).

In fact, in a sense it kind of doubles as a PR stunt as well. If Google are subject to some kind of legal process that compells them to reveal data, they can turn around and say “well, we do this”.

Whatever it is, I’m all for Google being more transparent about how they operate. To me, this seems like a ‘good thing’.