Beyond WHAT

From the AttentionTrust blog today:

” …Two of her [Elizabeth Lawley] comments really stood out for me. First:

Syndicated subscriptions are an attention filter… There are students of mine, colleagues of mine, who would love to be able to subscribe to my attention filter. ‘What is Liz reading?’

… Something implicit in Liz’s comment–and something I know Steve will discuss–is the importance of inattention. If I’m interested in knowing what Liz is reading (and I am), I’m just as interested in knowing what she’s NOT reading. “Attention filters” will help us find the good stuff and avoid the dreck, using attention data generated by us, our friends and colleagues, and although syndicated subscriptions are moving us in the right direction, we have a long way to go.

Liz was also careful to draw an important distinction between social networks and “attention networks,” and she posed a compelling question:

How do we meld attention networks with search?

This becomes a huge question when we start thinking about how “attention filters” might evolve. For example, my blogroll is a simple attention filter that gives you a very general sense of the issues that interest me, but it won’t tell you which authors I read the most, let alone which individual posts are most relevant to my interests.”

Hinted at in this entry is the concept of context. You want to know not only WHAT someone is reading, you want to know WHY someone is reading it and how much they LIKED it. In other words, you want to know a) was this worthy of their attention?; and b) did they get a good Return on Attention?

Simply capturing clickstreams cannot give you the context. But to make the concept of Attention Filters practical, we need to get to that level. Data without context doesn’t have meaning.