Library clips

Not long ago I posted on the many aspects of attention, part of this was leveraging on your network of friends…I’ve posted about this with friendstream, group lifestreams, lifestreams, Link Sharing, Spokeo, FeedEachOther, Collaborative Recommendation…

This post is about the other aspect of attention, and that’s encapsulating your attention in a file so you can plug ‘n play at any website you visit and view personalised content…or subscribe to feeds and see only content based on your attention.

Back when I posted on attention Chris Saad from particls noticed my post, and we had an IM chat about his new development in the attention arena that is going to brings it all full circle.

Six weeks later he has a new release called Engagd.

In essence what you do is give Engagd food, like RSS feeds, websites, text…
eg. give it your lifestream feed - plenty here - (this may include your blog feed, bookmarks feed, presence feed, various social network feeds, etc…), you could also give it your clickstream (surfstream) feed (try a service like Clutzr, slifeshare).

What engagd will do is use its Profiler tool to convert this content into an APML attention file, and allow you to scan it against new content you come across, so you will see filtered or ranked content only, helps with information overload.

But the real deal is when you can visit sites with lots of content like Amazon, and just plug in your file.

This is taking personalisation mobile, basically a portable personalised web experience.

Your APML file is created using the Profiler, it’s considered to be stuff you like and are interested in…the clickstream is a bit tricky, because you are not really rating pages you surf to, it just knows you visited a page (more on this in a minute).

Anyway, then this APML file is fed into Item.Rank…how it works:

You give Item.Rank any RSS feed and it will assign a rank to each item in the feed, representing how personally relevent the item is to you based on scanning your APML file.
This is like creating your own particls really, put in a feed and it will rank and deliver items according to your attention.

Next time you subscribe to a feed or read a feed (it passes through Profiler) and it will be filtered by your past attention.

NOTE: The Item.Rank doesn’t just accept feeds, you can assign it any content, like a library of data.

So what does this mean for platforms?

It’s not just about users feeding their APML file (by entering their lifestream and clickstream feed), you could give a service like Amazon permission to send Profiler your visit stats after you leave the website, this way every site we visit helps us build our attention. Then Profiler can inturn send Amazon back the updated APML file for each user on demand.

This makes it more enhanced; before this, as a user we could record sites we visit (clickstream), but not what we do there (now these sites can give us a copy of our visit data).

The second feature is, sites like Amazon, can give ItemRank a collection of content, so when a user visits they can plug in their APML file and get personalised content.

This is truly a new step in the attention game, that actually makes it complete and purposeful…up till now we could create attention files, but we couldn’t do much with them besides filter/rank feed content from any site that provides a feed.

Now we have the ultimate use, to visit any site and plug ‘n play.

Further to this, the site can send us our attention stats of our visit, so next time we visit we will have an even more personalised experience.

Engagd is the technology that any website can use to help the user web experience be more personalised, this is going to slingshot the attention game, as websites can just add a module to make it work, they don’t have to develop attention modules inhouse, they may not even know what attention is, but just like feeds, it’s easy to RSSify your site, now it will be easy for platforms/websites to engagdify their sites.

Recap

1. Give Profiler your Attention Data - in the form of RSS feeds or Web pages - and it will generate an APML file you.

2. Give ItemRank your APML file and a set of content, and it will return that content filtered and ranked by Personal Relevancy.

3. At the moment, the set of content you give ItemRank could be an RSS feed, but, as a user, how do you give it a library of information, how do you get into the backend of a library of data (like a book collection) this is when platforms, like Amazon or any library catalogue, can incorporate it for us, so when we visit we just plug in our APML file.

4. Sites will also send our attention file stats from our visit to Profiler, and our APML file will keep the service updated of our current attention.

Use Case

If I’m looking for stuff, I’ll search Google or I’ll visit del.icio.us (human indexed web).

The del.icio.us database gives all its content to ItemRank, you visit del.icio.us, plug in your APML file, and see stuff according to your APML attention file…wow, I see just what I want to see, it knows what I don’t like, everything I look at I’m interested in (this is the idea).

When I leave it updates my attention file of my granular experience, sculpturing my file even more, (this is a perpetual evolving file), and my current attention file is sent to del.icio.us so next time I visit, it knows me even more than it did last time.

What about visiting your local library or an online library like LibraryThing, you could visit a user, tag or the whole library and run it through your APML file.
The results will churn out books that you like, based on your past behaviour…spoonfed!!

Hmm, what happens if you don’t like something anymore, can you edit your attention file, to delete stuff out you are no longer interested in?

Could I use the attention file of another person, to see the world as them, and could I temporarily add it to my attention file, and plug that in as a social filter, rather than a personal filter?

Keep updated at the Engagd blog.

I’m about to try it now, and input my lifestream feed.