Update: For an excellent writeup of Attention Trust, see Seth Goldstein’s essay here.
Company: AttentionTrust
Launched: Today (I believe)
What is it?
Attention Trust is a project led by Steve Gillmor and others that is the next evolution of his Attention idea. It is a “A non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the basic rights of attention owners”.
From a post by Steve Gillmor on March 28, 2005:
Disrupt 2026: The tech ecosystem, all in one room
Your next round. Your next hire. Your next breakout opportunity. Find it at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where 10,000+ founders, investors, and tech leaders gather for three days of 250+ tactical sessions, powerful introductions, and market-defining innovation. Register now to save up to $400.
Save up to $300 or 30% to TechCrunch Founder Summit
1,000+ founders and investors come together at TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 for a full day focused on growth, execution, and real-world scaling. Learn from founders and investors who have shaped the industry. Connect with peers navigating similar growth stages. Walk away with tactics you can apply immediately
Offer ends March 13.
“What does matter is a pool of attention metadata owned by the users. This open cloud of reputational presence and authority can be mined by each group of constituents. Users can barter their attention in return for access to full content, membership priviliges, and incentives for strategic content. Vendors can build on top of that cloud of data with their own special sauce–the newbie crowd of MyYahoo, the pacesetter early adopters of Diller/Ask/Bloglines, the social attention farm of RoJo, and Google’s emerging Office service components orchestrated by the core GMail inforouter. And the media, which now includes publishers, analysts, researches, rating services, advertisers, sponsors, and underwriters, can use the data as a giant inference engine for leveraging the fat middle of the long tail.” Link
So what is AttentionTrust? It’s light on content for now, but it proposes a basic set of user rights to their attention data:
The idea of attention is hugely debated and polarized. It’s useful and needed, but will it work in the real world? The debate will continue as Steve pushes this idea forward.
We’ve joined AttentionTrust, and look forward to developments.
Additional Links/Research:
AttentionTrust, Steve Gillmor, Danny Ayers, Read/Write Web, O’Reilly Radar, Ted Leung, John Hagel, Jeff Clavier, Rough Type, New Persuasion, Corante, Got Ads?, Fiver Stone, pc4media, Ed Batista, Elizabeth Albrycht
Tags: attention, attention.xml, attentiontrust, techcrunch, web2.0
