In 1999 Spike Jonze enabled the characters of his movie “Being John Malkovich” to…well, “be” the actor John Malkovich for 15 minutes whenever they entered a magic hole hidden in a strange office. Gotta love that movie.
While the magical technology showcased in this great movie hasn’t been invented quite yet, Seth Goldstein came up with something that resembles it to some degree for the internet: his latest startup atten.tv (”attentive” or “atten TV”, either pronounciation is cool for me, great domain) provides a downloadable app called the “Attentron” (the name’s probably inspired by Rosenbaum’s “Perceptron“) with which users can see the web through the eyes of others, who decided to record and share their clickstream, aka the chronological documentation of the URLs they paid and are paying attention to, using AttentionTrust’s AttentionExtension (written by AttentionVeteran Stan).

While there are already a lot of services that enable users to broadcast their attention to others, atten.tv is the first to take such an extremly generic and open approach to this emerging mental economy of the web. It’s different from last.fm with respect to its universality: e.g. last.fm only records my iTunes songstream - atten.tv records all visited URLs (if I enable the ATX). However, both share the realtime aspect of the recording/broadcast. Funny how this aspect makes last.fm the new “radio”, while atten.tv obviously…well.
It’s different to del.icio.us with respect to its implicit openness: del.icio.us doesn’t actually “record” anything, I much rather have to explicitly state which URLs I find to be interesting, while in a way the ATX (and as a function of this, atten.tv) get to see much more from me, since it potentially records *every* URL I visit.

The service is in “alpha”, and when they say “alpha”, they mean it. I actually haven’t been able to run the Attentron in a useful way and I seem to have some problems with connecting my AttentionTrust ATX identity with my atten.tv account.

Once these things work, you’ll be able “be Fabian Stelzer” using this link (and your Attentron). Until then you might want to see the world through Dave Henderson’s or Seth Goldstein’s eyes - maybe you’ll get an idea for your own great startup once you see where these guys get their inspiration from. (I actually wanted to link to their respective atten.tv profile, but this doesn’t seem to work yet. The links will just take you to their homepages).

The last few weeks I’ve been doing some thinking on the meaning of “privacy” in days like this. We might have to revise our conceptions here. I’ll share my thoughts on this with you in the next post.

: atten.tv, attention, goldstein, henderson, privacy, clickstream, last.fm, tv, radio

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