On Friday, I participated in a workshop to launch the AttentionTrust. The main goal was to get a non-profit organization launched that will help evangelize the following beliefs:

You Own:

• Yourself
• Your data
• Your attention

And you have basic rights - the ability to move your data and attention, to control how it's used, and to decide who profits from it.

Examples of your attention data:

• Your credit history
• Your search history
• Your amazon transactions
• Your connections on a social network, ie. your LinkedIn data
• Your click stream across various websites

Why?

The AttentionTrust is a Web2.0 type approach to your activity and how marketers interact with you. Instead of consumers being passive and trading their attention for "free" services, consumers can now say: "My attention is mine, and I'm aware of how much it's worth. If companies want to get it, they should respect my rights."

Upshot

To succeed, the AttentionTrust mainly needs to educate people about a new way to think about the data they create. Think of attention as a valuable resource, and since you create it, you own it. Over the next few years, that type of thinking will change the way internet marketing works.

¶ 7/23/2005