Attention War

An attention war is breaking out, says Kevin Burton. He notes Claria is entering the personalized home page race popularized by the memetracker/reading list discussion that's been bubbling for the last few months. Burton cites Greg Linden's Findory as an early entry in the "implicit tuning" space. The SearchSIG session at AOL last month touched on this arms race as well (there's a podcast of the event somewhere.)

Kevin should be concerned about Claria's deep well of attention metadata, but he misses the point when he attacks the notion of people being willing to install a product from a spyware company. All proprietary clouds of data obtained without the users' permission are tainted, and it's my bet (GestureBank) that given a choice between an open pool and any proprietary one, the open pool will implicitly be more trusted.

Speaking of which, we're down to 7 4 open slots in the GB beta pool. If you want to contribute to the initial pool, send email from Gmail to gesturebank AT gmail.com.