Attention Operating System
Posted on July 7th, 2006 in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Steve Gilmore writes about the Attention Operating System. Ed Batista calls it mind blowing. I’m not sure I would go that far, a little too “hot off the press” for me. Obviously Steve is in brainstorming mode which is a good thing. I would caution him on a few points.
Realize people don’t want to be tracked so closely and instead think about building clickstream sanitizers to increase adoption recorders and the nascent ROOT Markets datastore.
IE 7 needs an attention plug-in.
Go to AD Tech in Chicago in a few weeks to get a sense of how marketers perceive Attention/Intention. They have been dying for this for years, albeit using different language to describe similar goals. Don’t mention operating systems.
Attention economy is going to reduce spam, alter pricing and change the way people interact with advertising/products/brands. That’s my take on the pitch.
Phrases like “Data portability guarantees choice and pricing pressure” sound great, but such is not the case. That’s an assumption at the highest level. We hope that will happen.
“Establish microcommunities with provable buying power” are group buys. We’ve been doing this on the internet via forums for a decade now. Time to make it mainstream, beginning of mass customization.
“Attention the meta layer above information routing”- it’s not *the* meta layer, attention is a new channel between people and marketers.
3 Responses
To be fair, Dave, I noted that “I couldn’t pretend to understand it all if I wanted to. But I’ve come to trust that when Steve’s at his most opaque, he’s talking about something that matters.”
I still don’t fully understand it all, and I don’t agree with all of Steve’s ideas that I DO understand. But I’m sure he’s onto something important.
I think some of your cautionary points are well-taken, particularly around how to communicate these ideas more effectively, a very important topic I also discussed recently.
Ed
Point taken. I was reacting to the unpolished techno-jargon and the fact that I don’t think it does anyone any good to think of what we are doing as an operating system, but we all frame new ideas in our own comfortable language.
There was a time where I was more interested in the systems that drive these ideas, whereas today I work with companies driving consumer adoption of Intention/Attention economy-driven services and am more involved with bridging the conversation between marketers and the technologists rolling out the first generation of attention/intention services.
FWIW, Dave, there is an attention plug-in (of a sort) for IE7: the GestureBank has published an alpha of a recorder.
It doesn’t (yet, I must assume) offer the same level of control over attention recording that the Firefox extension does; it only sends the data it captures to GestureBank, but I am given to understand that it eventually be open-sourced…..