Joe Seither, product manager for Claria’s PersonalWeb and author of the Claria Blog, wrote about some of my recent posts in an admittetly flattering way and I am certainly happy about this kind of attention.
However, I feel the need to get some things straight regarding my last post on Attention monetization. Dropping Claria and Google in one sentence was not necessarily meant to enhance Claria’s prestige (by juxtaposing it with a company whose reputation hardly could be any better).
Instead of justifying Clarias (former?) practices regarding user privacy and attention ownership, I was rather trying to point out how similar concerns could also be expressed about a company like Google and how Google and Claria are basically operating in the same field, which I called the meta attention business. That clearly doesn’t make Spyware any better, but is a hint to why we might be in need of a vision as developed by the AttentionTrust.

In fact, if Claria is really serious about their plan to exit the adware biz, they should just officially adhere to the principles of the AttentionTrust.
I would be the last to bear a grudge against a company that is really trying hard to change its ways for better.

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