About a week ago, I wrote a post that in my opinion Attention Services (at least in the Attention Trust sense) have not yet “crossed the chasm”. 

Interestingly, this week Business Week wrote a story on Root Markets titled “If I Had a Nickel for Every Click“  The article contains a lot of great information.

Seth Goldstien (founder of Attention Trust & Root Markets) follows up the article with a detailed post, Breaking News: ROOT + CBOT = $ for Lead Futures, describing how his idea was born & grew.  He opens by saying:

I am excited to announce the first official gesture in the financial securitization of Attention

Marshall Kirkpatrick (from TechCrunch) weights in on the concept & event positively, noting:

In the future, ROOT is likely to offer chunks of attention data that consumers have chosen to expose to prospective buyers in a futures market. It’s very experimental, but I think it’s fascinating … The news that CBOT has invested in the company and its CEO has joined its board is a very important validation of the Attention Data concept. …

It’s a very complicated and experimental situation. If the Attention Economy goes the direction that some of the key players participating want it to go in, today’s announcement of the CBOT investment in ROOT will likely go down in history as a key event in the emergence of users in control of our data and more widespread appreciation of that data’s worth.

Marshall is correct, one of the Attention Trust principals is economy and states:

You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Your attention has WORTH.

Now Seth is a wicked smart guy and I have a tremendous amount of respect for him.  (We have met twice over the past year.)  He is a serial entrepreneur, who also has a great grasp on the history of technology, broad understanding of capital markets (he founded an independent research boutique - Majestic Research).  He also has been extremely influential in evolving the concepts around an attention economy.   He co-founded the Attention Trust.org  and was the first person to start a commercial company around the concepts.  His series of posts (first one here) on attention over the last year are must reads!

However, I’m not sure the value we want to receive in return is money.  I see two problems with this:

1. It takes some time to reach critical mass.  Right now, there just doesn’t seem to be enough people using his recorder to generate a meaningful market.
2. They revenue from the futures market will either be difficult to explain to users or easy to game.  This is probably worthy of another post this week.  But at a high level, the problem is you either have to:

• Aggregate all revenue received and share it among the group (like Squidoo does) — This is complext and difficult to explain quickly to users. 
• OR - Share directly a part of the revenue generated from my attention & leave yourself vulnerable to fraud.  A real example would be visiting mortgage sites through the day to make sure my “futures” were worth a lot.  – You can see this manifesting itself today in click fraud.

Instead, what I think you need to do is ensure that your attention has value to users in more indirect ways - such as saving time.  Marshall in the TechCrunch post actually uses this as his example of receiving value:

I hope to be able to use services in the future that take my exposed Attention Data and run it through any number of value added services for my reuse. “Computer, bring me the best articles I’ve read on Attention from the five people I’ve communicated most recently with about the subject.”

It seems to me services like the one Marshall describes above are much more likely to create interest about downloading & using their Attention Service.  If I were Seth (and I should caveat this by saying - if I had achieved his level of advancement, I would consider myself a great success), then I would keep the team at Root.net much less focused on ”the financial securitization of Attention” and much more focused on creating real IMMEDIATE value (saving time for example) with people’s attention. 

To me this is an important topic, that I hope the community can dialogue about. This is significant, because it is key to reaching a large audience (if you will, cross the chasm).  I’m not sure the hope of one day selling your attention in an exchange will do that.

Of course, time will tell and it is never smart to bet against a serial entrepreneur!  Yes, Mom (the only reader of this blog anyway), I hope people say that about me some day.

So - what do you think … Is the financial securitization of attention the problem we should be focused on solving or should attention services focus on other less financial oriented value to share with people for their attention?

(Photo Credit - privateeye on Flickr)