Tomorrow the creators of Touchstone will announce a new initiative to implement a “Attention Profiling Mark-up Language” or APML. This new standard should allow users to export and use their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows them to export their reading lists from Feed Readers. The idea is to boil down all forms of Attention Data – including Browser History, OPML, Attention.XML, Email etc – to a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests. You might think this is a bit similar to the AttentionTrust service, but APML does not propose …read more

Attention is so 5 minutes ago, what we need are ‘Gestures’! I’ve just read an interesting post on zdnet.com (from Steve Gillmor) about GestureBank (via fredscapes.nl). The article is dated a while back but to be sincere I never heard of it before. Steve writes about the fact that current information is created in a broadcast, an attention-seeking environment, but Gesture-triggered data is generated as a result of multiple proferred contracts with users. So the future is too predict what people would like to read based on Gestures:
Attention to something is valuable, but in a world of too much information …read more