Aaron Mentele writing about non-evil attention profiling:
Chris Saad and Ashley Angell of Faraday Media / Touchstone have introduced a standard format for attention data. I’ve had a chance to look through the APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language) proposal, and short of seeing the word Profiling and noticing email address as an attribute in the profile, it looks promising. I can see a benefit to having an agreed-upon format for attention profiles, similar to the HL7 spec for personal health information.
The workgroup hopes that exporting your APML from services like Amazon or Google (my example) could become as easy as exporting your OPML. This data could then follow you to your feed reader / aggregator / recommendation engine / browser of choice.
Share your OPML- Dave Weiner did this.
I’ve been running Attention Recorder and sometimes feeding it into Attention Recorder and sometimes feeding it into ROOT.net for a year or so. I have yet to get anything back of interest except for general stats on my usage, which I could get from running an app locally. I haven’t bought, sold or learned anything new, so where is the value?
I’ve worked with companies like Trufina and Opinity, trying to get them to see the value of attention data. They get it, somewhat, but have not yet executed in a meaningful way that clearly shows users the value of gathering this data and applying it to users data.
And now we have APML. The idea of creating an Attention Profiling Mark-up Language is interesting at the service level provider, but what about the consumer? Who wants to “export their attention data?” I want appropriate advertising and offers that are contextually relevant. You can do that for 130 million people on Mysace by parsing their music and interests list. Thats probably a lot quicker and easier to execute than APML and Root.net will be for several years.
Touchstone is doing an alert system similar to Growl. If you have enough time to stare at a feed ticker this might be for you, for the rest of us, I’d rather see better filters in Newsreaders. What you are reading in your newsreader, is a subset of the total number of feeds you subscribe to (you don’t read everything, do you ?) If NNW could filter better I’d be all set. I use NetNewsWirePro, and can’t wait for version 3, perhaps filtering of duplicates will finally make it into the release.
“Touchstone helps your community subscribe to changes on your site quickly and easily. It removes the ambiguity of a lone RSS icon or the confusion of 50 ‘add to…’ chicklets.” This is great. Feedburner already does this. Looking forward to the beta.
As for Touchstone doing competitive intelligence gathering, there are already a plethora of companies doing this. Perhaps they have a new angle, but I don’t need another watch list, I’ve got about 50 already.
Sometimes you have to hit “Mark all as Rread” and go outside. That’s what I’m about to do.