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Had the pleasure of meeting Robert Scoble along with some other interesting folks last night at the Minneapolis Geek Bar Crawl. Toward the end of the evening, I took the opportunity to shamelessly bend Robert’s ear about my current pet issue (isn’t that really why we were all there?), attention.xml.

Since reading Steve Gillmor’s piece from the end of March, my head has been spinning with the potential implications for attention.xml. I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and have had some conversations with Garrick, and I’ve come to the conclusion that attention.xml has the power to remake the relationship between content creators and consumers in a way that’s mutually beneficial, and which will provide an honest and open profit model for content.

Currently, RSS is all the rage, but on both the content creation and content consumption side implementation is clumsy and random. Steve Gillmor has championed attention.xml as a means by which an RSS consumer can separate the wheat from the chaff in their feed aggregator using a combination of tagging, social networking, and real-time monitoring of feed-reading habits.

Dave Winer is wringing his hands over ads in RSS, which are in their infancy, suffering from shoddy implementation, and which often cause weeks’ worth of old posts to bubble back to the top of my aggregator. Dave argues that RSS should be understood as an ad in and of itself, be it an article snippet that brings you to a conventional site, or simply an advertisement for yourself. I would disagree somewhat, in that I think any time you require an additional click, an additional tab, an additional window from a reader, you’re asking too much, especially when they’re clicking through to see more text.

I think that attention.xml can solve Dave’s problems as well as Steve’s, and frankly, go a step or two beyond.

Steve has hinted at the potential for users to “barter” their attention.xml metadata. I would propose that a new model be created for RSS delivery of content based on this transaction.

Say I had the ability in my aggregator to designate three tags for feeds which would correspond to three levels of attention.xml disclosure. One tag would mark feeds as private, meaning they stayed off my feedroll, and weren’t shared. One tag would mark feeds as shared, meaning they were accessible to members of my social network, or available as a feedroll. The third tag would mark feeds as available in my attention.xml for commercial aggregation.

This tiered system gives the user the power to determine the extent of their relationship with a content provider. On the provider’s side would be two feeds, one which followed Dave’s model and provided snippets or headlines, hoping to draw the reader to the web site, where metrics and eyeballs can be harvested conventionally. The other feed would be accessible only to readers who agreed to include it in, and make available, their commercial attention.xml metadata.

To answer the question Steve Gillmor posted in a later column, if the link remains the coin of the realm in the Syndisphere, then an attention.xml metadata cloud becomes the currency market.

What I’m proposing is a profit model for content creation that is based on market research rather than advertising. Attention.xml can become a universal, anonymous loyalty card system for the web. Rather than trying to profit off of the sucker demographic with traditional ads, and allowing site visitors to be hijacked in the process, content creators are presented with a compelling reason to keep their feeds interesting and useful to their readers. If I unsubscribe, my attention.xml is no longer available to you for your internal use or for resale to market researchers.

I know that some will balk at the idea of giving up so much information. The attention.xml spec at this point allows for no specific user information, and the tag system I’ve described allows users full control over which information they share.

Thoughts?

This entry was posted on Friday, May 6th, 2005 at 8:06 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.