Attention

25 October 2007

It’s always about the ‘next big thing’, isn’t it?

This seems to be true about almost every aspect of the technology-based industries, and possibly none more so then the web. Not only content with the pursuit of the new, though, people have got to have a buzzword to go with it:

AJAX
Social Networks
User Generated Content
RSS
OPML
GeoTagging
The Semantic Web

The list is almost endless.

The latest ‘thing’ seems to be something called APML – there’s a good write-up about it here. APML stands for “Attention Profiling Markup Language” which obviously means absolutely nothing, other then for making an acronym that’s half decent.

The whole gist behind APML is that it’s a way of sharing your “Attention Data” with applications. The best way of getting your head round it is using Last.fm as the model: Last.fm has all this data about what music you’ve listened to – this is attention data – and if Last.fm adopted APML you’d easily be able to get this data out of Last.fm and use it with other applications and sites. So, for example, you could automatically populate your Facebook “Music” section on your profile with data pulled directly from Last.fm.

All sounds potentially useful, right?

Except – short of Last.fm and music – I’m not sure if there are many more end-user useful problems that can be solved by APML. The only other use case that seems remotely interesting is something based off browser history, which could then be used to generate a profile of things you’re interested in, but what interesting things can you do with this data?

Of course the answer – and the real reason people are so interested – is that all this profiling is massively useful for advertisers. If an advertiser could access that automatically generated profile of you they could easily target their ads much more effectively. More effective targeting = more money all round (it’s how Google makes its money). Of course, no-one is just going to submit their APML file to an advertiser, so I imagine it’s going to cause a raft of people trying to come up with APML-based applications and ideas, so they can get access to your attention data and pass that along (in some form) to their advertisers.

Of course, the other point well worth remembering that even buzzwords (previous “next big things”) that anyone reading this comes to accept as being mainstream (like RSS, for example) really haven’t got much penetration in the vast majority of the market.

From: Articles

25 October 2007