I’m at eTech right now, a 4 day geek business conference in San Diego. I’ve wanted to come for years, but the ~$1,000 ticket fee had never been an option. Walking in I was most surprised to see the number of attendees. Perhaps 1,000. I still haven’t figured out who the fellow attendees are but I do know a small crowd of passionate web/net inventors, so hopefully that’ll be true for everyone else.

[I do have to point out that for a conference entitled Emerging Technology the internet access is shamefully inadequate. Normally I cut a lot of slack for anyone providing bandwidth on-the-spot, but c'mon now.]

The overarching theme is Attention Trust as part of the Attention Economy. These are new terms that may or may not ever come to mean anything relevant. The concepts are being addressed because one’s interactions on the web are more than just staticly looking at pages. People expect and appreciate web sites and service keep track of them AND people would like to remain in control of their attention. In a nascent manner people are coming to desiresites and software to keep track of what they have given their attention to AND they would like that data to remain private and easily accessible.

I’m really not sure about this. I’ve followed the AttentionTrust movement and keep trying to find the nuggets of usefulness (whether personally or socialogically). So far I haven’t found it, but as someone born with a lackluster memory, I do aprpeciate sites and services that keep track of my actions I make and remind what I did before.