Serial entrepeneur and smart guy Seth Goldstein's got a long and fascinating post about
his new Attention Trust nonprofit and the market shifts and consumer behaviors that led to these ideas.
Building off Michael Goldhaber and others, Seth defines attention as a valuable commodity and posits that we can manage it like other assets(I think).
He writes: "Our challenge as consumers in the age of paid search and performance marketing, therefore, is whether/how to wrest control back from the machine that has begun to anticipate our intentions for its proprietary gain."
And
"The choruses of attention, data, privacy and identity are all converging in one giant conceptual mashup, which stretches from Web 2.0 pundits to members of Congress grappling with identity theft regulation. Lost at times are the basic rights we are fighting for, which I understand to be:
- You have the right to yourself.
- You have the right to your gestures.
- You have the right to your words.
- You have the right to your interests.
- You have the right to your attention.
- You have the right to your intentions."
Says Andrew Temam:
"...think about what AttentionTrust does, and how they do it. Hell, even what they intend to do, and how they intend to do it. ... Once you have thought about that, explain it to me, in less than 50 words, so that I can understand it. Because I dont."
I see his point...