According to ReadWriteWeb, Facebook has quietly added the ability for users to vote up or down on ads. RWW rightly calls the majority of advertising on Facebook crap. I couldn’t agree more. I spent the day giving thumbs down to the majority of the ads I saw. The lack of targeted, relevant advertising is stunning for a company with a valuation north of $15 billion.

Geo-targeted ads, where the content of the ad is specific to your zipcode, are quite common these days. Unfortunately the lions share of geo-targeted ads are limited to dating sites. The ad you see here is somewhat relevant. I’m single and in my 30′s, but the next ad could just as likely be for hair-loss.

One thing I have noticed lately is that social networks about fishing have showed up more often. I guess I have fishing mentioned somewhere in my profile. However, I’m disappointed that I talked about going fishing on Cape Cod at least a dozen times on Facebook and not once did I see an ad with an offer local to the Cape. Talk about a lost opportunity. I purchased a ton of fishing gear before the trip, and not one dollar was earned via a web ad. Yet ads for hot women in Boston show up daily because that’s where money is in the eyes of advertisers.

How much of this can be attributed to the lack of mature targeting services on Facebook? We know their application interface leaves a lot to be desired for developers. I’ll have to take a look at what information is available to advertisers.

Soon I’ll be talking about how social networking profiles contain a wealth of information about members that isn’t being fully utilized for targeting purposes, intention and attention-based marketing. This is what’s coming next in the world of social media and online advertising.

Color-coded Wikipedia entries indicate trust.

A new program developed at the University of California, Santa Cruz, aims to help with the problem by color-coding an entry’s individual phrases based on contributors’ past performance.

The program analyzes Wikipedia’s entire editing history–nearly two million pages and some 40 million edits for the English-language site alone–to estimate the trustworthiness of each page. It then shades the text in deepening hues of orange to signal dubious content. A 1,000-page demonstration version is already available on a web page operated by the program’s creator, Luca de Alfaro, associate professor of computer engineering at UCSC.

Will attention silos open up?

Apologies for the 3.0 moniker, but blog readers are brutally selective when searching for interesting headlines.

I’ve been thinking a lot more about  identity, attention and reputation. These reoccurring themes keep popping up in my consulting work and the blogosphere has no shortage of pundits who opine about the role of identity from time to time.

I continue to think Windows Cardspace could be a central theme to open profiles, attention and identity silos. The problem is that the current state of play is that the documentation is for developers, the test suites are stale and most of the blog posts about it are almost a year old. That is definitely not they way you want to roll out a potentially enormous shift in how people are represented on the Internet.

The architects and developers will continue to evolve the underlying protocols, improve security measures and create usable browser plug-ins and manageable datastores.

I want to start talking about how identity, attention and reputation are going to change how we interact with each other, web services, communities and institutions.

I will continue to maintain partial focus on emerging internet trends and the Boston Internet scene, as we are seriously underrepresented in the blogosphere and the MSM (main stream media).

If your company participates in the identity, attention or reputation space, or you’re doing cool stuff in the Boston area, sign up for the feed and keep me updated about what you’re up to.

Have a great weekend.

I was on the phone with a new acquaintance today, deeply immersed in our second finishing-each-others sentences discussion, when at some point the conversation skimmed over Boston-based Compete. Catching up on the Compete blog tonight, I came across this:

Today we announce that you can use Compete.com to measure a site’s Attention. Attention fuses engagement (measured by time) and traffic (measured by unique visitors) into a single, more complete picture of a web site’s value.

Today’s Enhancements:

• Attention: Introduction of the only attention-based web metrics
• Daily Data: Monitor site performance on a daily basis
• Velocity: Compare the relative growth of your site to another property
• Visits: Analyze the popularity of a site not only by how many people access it, but also how often they “visitâ€?
• Embeddable Graphs: Easily embed Compete graphs on your web site

Compete appears to be heading in the right direction when it comes to monitoring what we’re paying attention to online. It’s still early days as we move past pageviews (just think 3D clickstream tracking in SecondLife), and I’m glad to see Compete and Quantcast and the others  adding additional layers of detail to their reports. Someone on my other blog asked how Compete knows if you are a visitor or logged into a site, I’m not sure about that. One thing that did surprise me is mention of Deal Light and Coupon Mountain in the Compete FAQ.

I don’t like that you have to install toolbars and pixel beacons or Javascript to show up for these services to work. Can’t someoneborrow a few lambda on the Carnivore net?

One tweak I would make the the “why Attention is important.” First, let’s stick with a lower-case a, shall we? Second, the phrase “Where we spend our time is where we find the most value” stuck out. I recently talked about spending a lot of time at the WordPress Codex, trying to do some tricky stuff with this blog. I spent an inordinate amount of time at the Codex, mostly because I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

If it takes me a long time to find what I’m looking for, does that mean a site is high-value?

I would rather see a metric for usefulness. About.com is not useful to me for most topics, but it has good rank and a ton of visitors. This is a different measurement than trying to compare how sticky Myspace is compared to Yahoo.

Which is in itself difficult to measure because Yahoo is hundreds of sites and has 500 million registered users whereas Myspace is a single site destination with 130+ million registered users.Compete and Quantcast are going to put a dent in Comscore and Hitwise revenue, but now I have to triangulate datapoints with 5 different services. At least we’re not relying solely on Alexa anymore.

Brad Feld, one of my favorite VC bloggers, has announced the Defrag Conference.

Last year, Eric Norlin sent me an email in response to my post titled Intelligence Amplification which was an attempt to put a label on the theme for companies I’d been investing in that address the Trust / Attention / Relevance problem.  Eric and I had crossed paths a few times around his involvement in the creation of Digital ID World.  He proposed that we put together a conference that addresses this broad theme and I jumped at the idea to help.

Having several clients in the trust/attention/relevance space, it’s time these founding principles of  the next wave of innovation on the net had a new avenue for discussion and exploration.

Some thoughts on how we got to the point where Defrag makes sense:

Attention Trust, Root Markets and various other attention recorders have been around for a while. Typical early adopter case studies, underpromoted, not enough traction even in the geekspace and too scary for most people to even consider. These tracking systems are terrifying and the value proposition is not clear. Then everyone got distracted by OpenID and now we have the  atomization of conversation down to the Twitter-level.

Cardspace could be a nice front end to t/a/r apps. I’m actually more excited about that than OpenID. Nobody seems to be talking about this.

Tracking the sites that I surf and then applying an inference engine is a first step. Problem is, you need to make the right assumptions about what traffic patterns say about people to make it useful. Where are the behavioral psychologists and related academics weighing in on this stuff?
Parsing social nets and blog pages with a zeitgeist engine and creating a profile that can be exposed to friends and marketers is going to be huge.

I remain perplexed why someone doesn’t go out, create a transparent distributed database and an opt-in marketing service that’s more than a “this is what I like and what I buy” Myspace widget, and pair up with the Big Media connections required to make these services useful to consumers. Maybe a group of people will connect at Defrag and make this happen.

The Identity conference at Berkman last summer kicked off a lot of new ideas and services based on t/a/r. We have all learned a lot since the and need a follow-up to keep the inertia moving forward.

Subscribe to the Defrag blog and put in your two cents about what you would like to see covered at the conference.

Adam Carstens from the Attention Company emailed from Tokyo to share recent research done by the company.  They surveyed a group of managers and found their attention profiles varied greatly depending on the type of media involved. These attention maps make it easy to discover, measure and analyze where attention is being focused. I signed up to try out the tool, will report back once I’ve had a chance to check it out.

Over the summer I attended the Identity Mashup at Harvard. One of the many supersmart people I met there was Nicholas Givotovsky. Nicholas is working on some interesting angles of the identity space that I can’t talk about, but guarantee will be parts of our lives in the near future. Very exciting stuff.
I visited Nicholas recently at his farm in CT. We went walking in the woods, when he told me they were the woods where the Blair Witch Project was filmed. I wish he had told me that after the fact, the spooky factor was off the chart.
This week I was talking to a Silicon Valley reporter about SecondLife. Today she sends me a link to a research paper titled Measuring the Value of Media Engagement Against the Economics of Attention. The attention buzzword gets me every time, so I followed the link. It turns out that Nicholas was the author. Small world indeed.

Delivering on the promise of ‘any content, any time, any where, on any device’ by its nature defies measurement. The inherent uncertainty around the conditions and conduct associated with media consumption complicates determining both who is consuming media and the extent to which that consumption experience constitutes true engagement. Media consumption is no longer defined by stationary or static experiences but has become so dynamic that creating realistic measurement methods is proving extremely difficult.

Tomorrow’s media environment will be increasingly characterized by on-demand, highly fragmented yet highly personalized media experiences. The challenge that media and advertising companies face is how to determine the value of incomplete or partial attention versus static full-on media engagement.

Right on. It’s time to join the discussion and debate surrounding how media will react to consumer’s continuous partial attention.

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.

The abstract from bud.com may be of interest

bud.com is an experiment to turn our personal data trails into a playfield for a web-based massively-multiplayer online game. Call it passively multiplayer – the reality of communication networks. Already, Web 2.0 and social networking sites keep track of our relationships and communications. bud.com proposes to make that web more engaging through surveillance with non-threatening stakes: browser-based multiplayer play.

This could be another use for the attention recorder. View the single-player information architecture diagram at full scale and you’ll in fact see a placeholder called Attention Trust.

The link from AT to surf patterns to disposition caught my eye. How will be discern disposition from clickstreams?

Silicon Beat tells us that Google will launch Gbuy, their answer to Paypal. The service will track shoppers from the browsing to post-purchase stages of e-commerce transactions. This kind of attention data is going to be quite useful, depending on whether or not Google will release an API to let sellers and third parties access the data.

I can see ROOT markets having a whole section based on Gbuy data. Here’s a list of 5,000 people who bought Xmen 3 DVD’s who have expressed interest (opt-in or browsed) Billy Blanks Tae Bo DVD’s.

People tend to comment on the consumer side of ROOT Market’s attention data. Do yourself a favor and check out ROOT Exchange. Right now they talk about mortgages and ad inventory, which made me sleepy. Obviously they are trying for lowest-hanging fruit markets first, but mortgages? Is that the “hot” market that is going to jump on board the Attention Economy first? There are more ads than inventory these days, using ad inventory to generate leads is in interesting concept, I need to check out the FormServer, at which point I’ll have more to say about ROOT’s lead generation services.

Two points of interest:

- The Root Exchange does not charge a large commission or transaction fee, so sellers can maximize their revenue.

- The Root Exchange accepts high-quality sellers only, evaluating each seller’s lead generation practices before admitting them as a member.

I’m curious as to what defines not-large commissions and high-quality leads. Quite subjective.