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.

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