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What is the likelihood that you leave if you see an irrelevant headline? High.

The idea behind the Attention Economy is to create a marketplace where consumers are happy, because if they are shown relevant information

For example news feeds illustrate the point well, since they ask for consumers attention in exchange for the opportunity to show him/her advertising. The Search engines are similar in that respect, because they show ads in exchange for helping users find answers online.

It is important to realize that the key ingredient in the attention game is relevancy.

So the question is: how do you show the user relevant content? This is a complex problem that can be partially addressed by recommendation engines.

Another key ingredient of the Attention Economy is privacy.

The challenge is not just to protect consumers information, the challenge is to put the user in control of her information.

AttentionTrust succeeded in defining a simple, elegant, yet encompassing set of principles that define the rules of the game, by outlining the basic consumer rights in the AttentionEconomy: 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.

So these seemingly simple rules ensure that participants transact fairly and that businesses do not monopolize users information

Ideally, a body of standards and protocols should be the technological foundation of the Attention Economy. Since these are early days of the conversation about attention, such standards do not yet exist. Here is an outline of what the Attention Architecture will look like (there is a detailed post on the topic from last year on my personal blog):

So from a technical point of view, the key to facilitating the attention marketplace is in decoupling of attention capturing, attention storage and attention recording services.

Silos: User information needs to be freed from proprietary silos Round Table: The industry needs to create a round table, to enable organizations to govern both the business and technical aspects of the attention economy (think Java Community Process). Education: People need to be educated about the value of their attention and the principles of attention economy. Avoiding privacy concerns will not work, instead they need to be tackled head on.