The A Team

Now that I've gotten that off my chest, a few words about the Attention Economy land grab this week (continuing thru next Wednesday at Esther's conference.) Thanks to Esther for pointing out that Michael Goldhaber (Einstein of Attention) started talking about this in Release 1.0. in 1992. I was wondering where I got the idea from. Imagine my amazement when I found out that Goldhaber invented RSS in 1989, thereby setting the stage for today's infoglut crisis and the reflowering of Attention 2.0. Nonetheless, success has a thousand fathers and mothers, as Fred Wilson points out, so I'm glad Goldhaber now has the impetus to lock in a book deal. Oh really? No, O'Reilly.

Other Attention winners:

• R0ml Lefkowitz, who wowed the Etech audience Fantastic Voyage-style with his tour of the sets for the Root Vaults database.
  
• Seth Goldstein, for landing in the NY Post in a story that curiously omitted use of the A-word.
• Doc Searls, for his brilliant encapsulation of the A-conomy as a subset of the Intention Economy, paving the way for the Inattention Economy
• Ray Ozzie, for his gracious and inspired gift to the Net of Live Clipboard and his appearance on the Gillmor Gang where he elegantly ducked the question of what that had to do with Attention.
• Me, for getting attention by not showing up. Thanks, Doc, Dan, and Phil Windley for the gestures.
  

Thus we come full circle to Gestures. At the heart of the GestureBank project is the notion of creating an anonymized aggregated pool of attention metadata. Without such a pool, freely available like Live Clipboard to the community, nothing will come of the Attention, Intention, or any other economy. That was the fundamental reason why Seth Goldstein and I founded the AttentionTrust and gifted the Attention Recorder to underline the Trust's principles. It is also why Dave Sifry and I created attention.xml, to establish a stream of anonymized aggregated metadata. Of course, players have FUDed both efforts, the Trust by pretending to support the principles except for those that tend to undermine proprietary pools of metadata, and Axml by attacking the spec as proprietary or threatening revenue models.

That's why, in spite of my desire to crawl in a hole and sit out this feeding frenzy, I'm excited about the GestureBank project. Beginning in a few hours or days, we will launch a private beta, hopefully providing enough data to populate the demo on Thursday night at SDForum Search SIG. If you are interested in participating, send me email at gesturebank AT gmail.com. The only requirements are a Gmail account (we're using Gchat for communications due to its autoarchiving functions) and a willingness to contribute to the community. I'll be looking forward to seeing your names light up in green on my GestureBank console.