Imagine the implications of an Internet where users are paid to use it in return for their ATTENTION, rather than the current model where users pay to use the Internet.

Here is a little insight into this concept from blogger Marc Cantor, found at Click to Open Web Page

Breaking the Web Wide Open: Identity, Attention, and Open Media With the upsurge of open standards for the web, today's web giants will no longer be able to lay claim to our online identities, attention, or digital content.

How many readers know what their online attention is worth? If you don’t, Google and Yahoo do—they make their living off it. They know what we search for, happily turn it into a keyward, and sell that keyword to advertisers. They make money off our attention. We don’t.

Technorati and friends proposed an attention standard, Attention.xml, designed to “help you keep track of what you’ve read, what you’re spending time on, and what you should be paying attention to.” Attention Trust is an effort by Steve Gillmor and Seth Goldstein to standardize on how your Attention data is used. Blogger Peter Caputa gives a good summary of Attention Trust. Imagine if all of that information could be stored in a nice neat little xml file. And when we travel around the web, we can optionally share it with websites or other people. We can make them pay for it, lease it…we get to decide who has access to it, how long they have access to it, and what we want in return. And they have to tell us what they are to our attention data.”

So when you give your attention to sites that adhere to the Attention Trust, your attention rights (you own your attention, you can move your attention, you can pay attention and be paid for it, and you can see how your attention is used) are guaranteed. Attention data is crucial to the future of the open web, and Steve and Seth are making sure that no one entity or oligopoly controls it.

The whole posting can be found at:

Click to Open Web Page