Personal Attention Tracking
Earlier this week Rex Hammock posted about the “popular topics” feature in FeedDemon and how it is essentially a personal meme tracker. Essentially, a meme tracker displays what other people are giving attention to; it is something that says “hey, these are the stories you need to see”. It is very neat and I am one of many people hoping/waiting for similar functionality to be added to NetNewsWire.
Similarly, I am doing attention tracking on statzen. Whereas a meme tracker is tracking attention people are giving to a topic, statzen is tracking the attention people are giving to an individual blog. In my sidebar there is a statzen widget that is showing the topics (based on tags) and the posts that people are giving the most attention to on my blog. as a blog author this provides me with valuable feedback as to which posts and topics people like. I can then write more posts along those lines to give people what they want (or tune monetization strategies).
NetNewsWire is tracking what I read. Most NetNewsWire users know that feeds can be sorted based on attention. What is lesser know is that that attention data can be exported out of NetNewsWire into Attention.XML (and I think Nick added that to FeedDemon too). I would like for statzen to provide attention information in Attention.XML too, but there is a problem.
Attention.XML showed so much promise, but it has just not caught on. This promise is exemplified by this quote from Steve Rubel:
Scoble said that by the end of 2005 we’ll all know what attention.xml is and why it’s important for the services we choose to support it. Listening to this podcast with Steve Gillmor and Chris Pirillo today, I could not help but agree
The dismal failure of Attention.XML is exemplified by the fact that the spec for Attention.XML is a wiki page that Technorati has let get replace with spam ([snark] could that be a systemic problem at Technorati? [/snark]). Attention.XML is a great idea, but so far it has been a miserable failure. I hope the idea of sharing attention data resurges. The time has come.
