Hawking your attention for fun and profit

Computerworld - Personal home pages and blogs. MySpace, YouTube and Twitter. All of the Internet tools that allow us to celebrate our inner exhibitionist have found their Web niches.

Now a San Francisco Bay area start-up hopes to take this trend one step further by letting users webcast in real time to friends and family  -- or even to paying fans and marketers -- which sites they are visiting.

But AttentTV has another goal, according to Seth Goldstein, co-founder of AttentionSoft, the company that created the software. The firm aims to empower consumers in the coming "attention economy" by giving them control over the record of how they spend their valuable time online.

"Your attention is your time, and it should belong to you," said Goldstein, who demonstrated Atten.TV at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego on Monday and is publishing his own personal clickstream in the form of an RSS feed.

According to attention economists, in today’s wealthy, media-rich post-industrial nations, things are cheap to buy or consume. It’s our free time that is a scarce, precious resource, and hence valuable -- not just to ourselves, but to marketers and advertisers.

Attention economics elegantly explains the social contract of ad-supported media: The consumer gets free or discounted access to content in return to agreeing to being bombarded by TV commercials, magazine ads, or online pop-up ads. It also explains why spam, by distracting us with ads for things we’re not interested in, is actually an economic cost as real as the mortgage we pay on our home. (Which is why spam annoys us so much.)

Dot-com firms such as the now-defunct Cybergold, which paid users to view Web advertising, implicitly relied on attention economics. The difference between CyberGold and Atten.TV is that the latter is intended to shift the economic benefit markedly further to the consumers’ side of the equation.

A former advertising executive, Goldstein says a 2005 conversation he had with Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos helped crystallize his thinking.

"I asked him, 'My purchase history on Amazon -- who owns it? Is it mine or yours?' And Bezos admitted that legally, we both had the right to it, though Amazon probably wouldn’t go out of its way to make it easy for me to get at it," Goldstein said.

Moreover, Goldstein claims, our clickstreams and Web histories are already being gathered and sold, in most cases by Internet service providers. In the fine print of their contracts are provisions that allow them to sell users’ anonymous browsing histories to marketers, who use the information to target their advertising to more likely buyers.

But Goldstein figures that if anyone should be able to benefit economically from the value of our Web clickstream, it should be the people doing the clicking.