Monday, October 08, 2007

Basics of Attention Profiling

No comments :
Marjolein Hoekstra over at the CleverClogs blog which often covers news alerts services has a good post on Attention Profiling for non-techies that describes some of the purposes and benefits of Attention Data and provides details of what an Attention profile can be based on such as :
  • pages you bookmark and tags you assign
  • your favorite videos, music and TV shows
  • hyperlinks you follow and share with your friends
  • things you write about and topics you keep track of
  • items you click on in your feed reader
  • things you buy from a web store
  • places you visit and events you attend

As people are learning and participating in conversations about Attention Data and the capabilities around capturing and sharing one's Attention a lot of the conversations turn to target Advertising or even recommendation engines (see this post on Read/WriteWeb). Although those are certainly two important uses that i guarantee we will be seeing a lot of services popping up around, I also believe that Attention can be a great way to target News to users both within RSS feed readers and destination News sites.

In Marjolein's post she provides an example about how she sees the benefits of a News site that removes sports pages from the home page that she might land on because it is clear that she is not interested in soccer and baseball. News sites today typically offer personalization based on a user setting up a profile that requires registration and setup and it usually is not utilized (especially in the enterprise News portal space). Personalization based on the users 'real time' Attention Profile that they 'bring' to the site without the need for ongoing explicit action could be very powerful.

The post also takes you through the simple steps to create your personal Attention Profile using the Engagd service. My Attention profile is also publicly available and as i have written before i am a member of the APML Workgroup.

No comments :