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Although we met briefly last week, Kevin Burton and I didn't manage to get enough time to discuss…

RSS 1.0 Modules: Taxonomy The taxonomy module is a RSS 1.0 module and a RDF application enabling the identification of topics covered by a RSS channel or item. (tags: RSS ontology rdf taxonomy) Peer Pressure » Your Attention, Please…

Close on the heels of my previous post about attention data formats (though certainly not prompted by it), Alex Barnett and Kevin Burton post a podcast (mp3) about, in part, OPML as attention data.
There’s some good stuff in there, not least th…

Matt Gertner joins the discussion on attention data formats, commenting on the recent posts by Nick Bradbury, Steve Gillmor, and Alex Barnett.

You’re right that in many cases the algorithms for managing community-generated data on a centralized server are much simpler than the equivalent decentralized approach. Something like Flickr’s interestingness rating is a particularly sticky case, since it needs aggregate data from a lot of users to do anything useful. (Though I remember seeing an academic paper about a distributed clustering algorithm.)

The point of my post is not that centralized services of this type should disappear, it is that the primary repository for a user’s surfing patterns and suchlike should be their own machine. In the same way that managing certain data centrally enables cool applications like Flickr, I’m convinced that controlling a profile that takes into account a single user’s activities across multiple websites will lead to an explosion of new toys like the personalized Memorandum clone I proposed. Of course, no one is going to stop a site from collecting information about what users are doing on that site.

I should add that you can take a lot of the complexity out of distributed apps, while preserving the advantages, by providing a generic P2P platform to do the heavy lifting. Hmmm, there might be a business idea there.

But why donate isolated bits of your surfing profile to third parties when you could capture the whole lot in your browser and use it for your own ends?

to which I’d reply that often, these 3rd parties add value that cannot be decentralized easily.

My favorite example, as always, is Flickr. The value of of Flickr is not the sharing of JPEG files but the comments, groups, tags and other mechanisms for distribution and socializing.

One point should be made here: I only accept their data gathering because they export much of it as RSS and ATOM feeds, so I can get it out again.

Although we met briefly last week, Kevin Burton and I didn’t manage to get enough time to discuss some…

Funny you mentioned attention and the aggregator as I’m going to be adding the attention trust toolbar support to TaiRank…