I listened to a 3-part Steve Gillmor AttentionTech podcast (with Dave Winer phoning in) and probably moved things along a bit further in the getting it dimension for OPML, but I’m somewhat bothered by the flatfilishness of the examples of attention I keep hearing –they seem to be stuck in ‘what blogs do you read how much’ territory, which makes for a pretty shallow and limited conception of attention, and the model seems to be *to sell attention data.

Attention is much more multifaceted, being both multidimensional and volatile too: from week to week and over months my attention is assigned to many different realms, often interconnected but sometimes quite disjunctive as I pick up and put down various threads, now more focused, now attending to more things more shallowly, now following a specific trail of interconnections. I want to be able to visualize and analyze that flux, and to be able to revisit any of the states of the past with a click. I want the kind of map that Dave Pollard implies (“your brain’s memory laid out as a wiki tableau”). I want that for myself, and I’d want to be able to export it to somebody else (perhaps in pruned/edited form). But most of all I want that as a long-haul tool for understanding my own progress in the digital realm.