With this article I hope to reach out to the companies and thought leaders working in the attention space and start the dialog on the infrastructure for the Attention Economy. Note that the views presented in this article are my own and do not represent the views of the AttentionTrust organization.

I have previously discussed here the exciting developments happening in the attention space. The Attention Economy and Attention Architecture are in the early days, but there are clear indications of growth. Ever since Steve Gillmor and Seth Goldstein co-founded AttentionTrust, the topic of attention is getting, well, a lot of attention. And very rightly so - AttentionTrust created principles that put the user in control of the data and open the door for new, exciting set of personalization applications.

The AttentionTrust was created based on the four core principles that guarantee that the users are in control of their data and that the privacy is always respected:

• Property: You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish. You have CONTROL.
• Mobility: You can securely move your attention wherever you want whenever you want to.
  You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention.
• Economy: You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return.
  Your attention has WORTH.
• Transparency: You can see exactly how your attention is being used.

The first blocks of the attention ecosystem infrastructure have been mapped out since AttentionTrust created an add-on to the Firefox browser called AttentionRecorder.

The recorder in its current form, provides basic, yet encompassing and essential function of capturing timestamped click stream, otherwise known as implicit attention.

The Diagram 2 shows the XML output of the AttentionRecorder, which is essentially a set of HTTP transactions.

In accordance with the Property principle the recorder offers the user a choice to either store these attention records in a local file or to direct them to one of the approved attention services. If the user chooses a remote storage, the records are sent via HTTP.

The current infrastructure facilitates capturing and storage of the implicit attention. In a way, it defines the interface for storing this type of attention, but it, intentionally, does not focus on the interface for accessing the stored attention records. Also, the format that AttentionRecorder uses today is not generic, but rather specific to the click stream. In the following sections I will discuss how the current infrastructure can be extended to accommodate additional types of attention and will discuss the interface for reading/writing the data from/to the Individual Information Storage Service.

The types of Attention
As we discussed, currently the AttentionRecorder captures implicit attention. There are also other types of attention. For example, bookmarks are a variant of explicit attention. The difference between implicit and explicit attention is that the user makes an explicit effort to store the information.

We can gain further insight into explicit attention by looking at the famous social bookmarking service called del.icio.us This services has popularized the notion of tags - the labels or attributes attached by the user to a piece of information. Seth Goldstein told me that del.icio.us's founder, Joshua Schachter, thought of tags as a crystallized attention. The tags illuminate the personal angle on the information - what exactly the user is paying attention to here?

Like tags, the rating captures another aspect of attention. For example, the services like BlinkList and Ma.gnolia include the rating information in addition to the URL information. By rating an article the user specifies the attitude or the outcome of the attention. Recognizing the importance and the value of the rating, the sites like Netflix and Amazon have always allowed the users to rate movies, books , music, etc.

And there is yet another type of attention - explicit semantical attention, that is the attention related to objects like books, movies, music, wine and restaurants. The blueorganizer that we are developing at adaptiveblue focuses on capturing this kind of attention. Here is the XML illustrating how the blueorganizer represents books: