The Progress Bar

My cousin Laran has a blog which I stumbled across by chance.

Download it and try out the new video calling feature. I’m relaxedguy on Skype if you want to test the video.

VC and the Attention economy
Interoperability, Open Identity and Identity Brokers
Kim Cameron’s Infocard Tutorial
Root Vaults announces new Data Exchanging Features and Public Display of Attention (PDA).
Scoble on David Berlind and Doc on Intention.

For Sale: PC2700S 512MB DDR RAM good for many Powerbook styles.
$60.00 OBO.

Cori at Attention Trust has been testing a mildly updated ATX extension that’s compatible with Firefox 2.0 beta 1 for the last few days. If any of you have jumped on the 2.0 beta bandwagon and want to test-drive the Attention Recorder, you can get the updated download at http://attentiontrust.org/download/attention_0.65b.xpi.

A family friend who is the copy editor for the Foreign Desk at the New York Times was featured in Pursue the Passion. When you read about Iraq or Israel, his eyes are the last to see every story before they get shipped off to production. Truly a gifted and passionate individual as any I have ever met.

Clicking around Yahoo! Research I came across Mindset, which has been around for a while but caught my eye when I was searching for intention-based search.

Mindset is an early demonstration of our ongoing machine learning research applied to the problem of web search. We trained an automated text classifier which determines whether any given web page is mostly “commercial” (e.g. it’s main purpose is to sell you something) or not. We used new advanced algorithms recently developed at Yahoo! Research to train a classifier which is accurate and yet still fast enough to classify web pages on the fly as they show up in search results.

The demo provides a slider widget for users to explicitly specify their intent. Leaving the slider in the middle means they want to use the original Yahoo! search result order. Moving the slider to the extreme right means they want the top results to be those which the classifier is most confident are “non-commercial”.

Putting the slider in between those two positions means a blend — somewhat faithful to the original ordering but also tending to bring the more obvious non-commercial pages to the top. Similarly, sliding into the left half indicates blending of commercialness confidence vs original ordering. Regardless of the exact user interface mechanism (which was not the focus of our work), Mindset demonstrates how machine learning can enable explicit user intent to be harnessed to improve the search experience.

This goes back to something Doc Searls said a few weeks ago at Identity Mashup. Doc doesn’t pay much heed to the fact that people need to be aware of something before they get to purchasing mode. His attention marketing example is often that he wants to purchase a specific lens for his camera whereas I’m more interested in concepts and exploration of general product categories.

The simple slider control mechanism in Mindset makes it easy to express your intent. Either you are researching or ready to buy.

Moving the slider towards “researching” returns results which could be added into your attention stream. Passing the external and current attention data between research and shopping would simplify purchase process and make Mindset even more useful.

Once you have done your research, moving the slider over to “shopping” signifies your intention to make a purchase and the tool could be primed with your previous attention data, showing you the best prices for the products and services you’ve researched and are considering. Right now you’re greeting with a familiar search engine list of links, I’d like to see an interim page with a current snapshot of my information which I could then tweak before moving on to the actual purchasing process. All of this information would be fed back into my attention datastore as well.
I need to spend a lot more time with Mindset. The results could certainly use some work, but if the feedback loop is tight and external data can be pulled in, Mindset could evolve into a useful tool.

The Tech Buzz Game is a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends from Yahoo! Research. It’s addictive to buy and sell shares in Open Source tools, API categories ad services and of course the browser wars. Requires you to log in every few hours to tweak your holdings if you want to seriously play the market. I’m amazed that someone already took the default $10,000 and turned it into over $4 million dollars.

I finally got around to watching Douglas Rushkoff narrate The Merchants of Cool (2001). Somewhat dated yet insightful look into teen marketing. Still shocking to see the reality of teen culture and it’s relationship with handful of multinational corporations.
I followed up with The Persuaders (2004), another Rushkoff/PBS production. General premise is the more adverting we make, the more advertisers have to make to break through the clutter, or advertising immunity.
Choice quote:

Once the market becomes the lens through which we choose to view the world, then there is no difference between us and them. We’re all persuaders.

This reminds me about prepositional marketing. P2P marketing as opposed to B2C. Also reminds me of the current version of Buzz Marketing, which I despise and consider worse than spam.
The part about Acxiom was scary. They not only know what we pay attention to today, they project our intentions out several years.
Interesting terms: Persuasion industry, identity through meaning and inducing people to persuade themselves. All key to attention/intention economy.