AttentionTrust

AttentionTrust.org is "A non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the basic rights of attention owners."  They believe in the following rights:

• Property: You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish. You have CONTROL.
• Mobility: You can securely move your attention wherever you want whenever you want to. You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention.
• Economy: You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Your attention has WORTH.
• Transparency: You can see exactly how your attention is being used. You can DECIDE who you trust.

And their stated mission is:

• Empower people to exert greater control over their “attention data,” i.e. any records reflecting what they have paid attention to and what they have ignored. We accomplish this by promoting the principles of user control, by distributing our Attention Recorder, and by supporting the development of other appropriate tools, standards and practices.
• Educate people about the value of their attention and the importance of attention data.
• Build a community of individuals and organizations that will guarantee users’ rights to own, move, and exchange their attention data, in a transparent environment that gives users the freedom to decide how their data will be used.

Their board of directors is

Hank Barry, Secretary
Ed Batista, Executive Director
Nick Bradbury
Dick Costolo
Seth Goldstein, Chairperson
Mary Hodder, Chairperson, Advisory Council
Clay Shirky

It sounds like a worthy idea, and one that I'm sure sounds eminently agreeable to most people, perhaps in part because it's so vague.

This hijacking of the psychological term "attention" bugs me, but that's probably a lost cause.  "The Attention Economy" was apparently the theme of last week's whole "Etech" conference -- who knew?  I'm so out of touch on my IT/business/marketing buzzwords.  This usage seems to presume the whole data-processor theory of human behavior -- everything is data (thus money), etc.

I also wonder if this effort can ever be genuine if it's corporate-funded.  (They haven't yet raised money, but the site says "Contributions will be accepted from both corporations and individuals.")

Spotted at michaelzimmer.org : AttentionTrust: Owning your Data.  More at Mary Hodder's Napterization.