I have talked about “Attention” for a while now, and think it’s a important for everyone to understand how valuable their attention is. Jeff Jarvis is calling Yahoo, Apple, Google Reader, NewsGator and other RSS newsreaders to task in wanting to know specifics about how his feeds are being used.
I know for example if I visit bloglines.com how many people are subscribed to the Geek News Central RSS feed but they among others cache that data. Since most companies are caching information the raw hit info is not being reported back to the source where this information can be registered within the servers log files.
Personally I don’t care who is reading the info from this site and where they are coming from literally, but I would like a better way to measure article impact. Honestly though I don’t dwell on it to much but as I have said in some recent articles the tools that are out their now to measure RSS are pretty bad.
Jeff gets called to the carpet by several of the readers, but I think many miss the point and do not understand the value and the importance of Attention. A recent comment by a reader of GNC and listener of the podcast made me do some thinking about Attention, in understanding that not only is Attention data a two way street with you the reader and I, but it also should be a two way street between me and those that make a lot of money by providing my content along with a large number of others content to a centralized audience.
So in principle I agree with Jeff but to be honest I think it will be a long time before most of these companies every get on board and realize that if they provided us some semblance of good statistics it would ultimately help those of us that keep track of this stuff.
Some of you that are very vocal will drop me a comment of e-mail on articles that peak your interest most will not. For more info on Attention please visit the AttentionTrust.org which this site is a member of. [Jeff Jarvis]