Attention mashups

Monday, July 30, 2007 by Dave Winer.

ReadWriteWeb wonders if the "attention silos" will ever open up. 

This is a long-told tale here on Scripting News. The classic example are the movie rating data held in silos by sites like Netflix and Yahoo Movies. 

But whose data is it??  

Seems it belongs to the users and they should be able to take it where they want. Sure Yahoo is providing a recommendation engine, that's nice (and thanks), but they also get to use my data for their own purposes. Seems like a fair trade. And I'm a paying customer of Netflix. They just lowered the price but I'd much rather have gotten a dividend in the form of being able to use my own data.  

Think of the mashups that would be possible.  

Wouldn't it be great to link up Match.com with movie ratings to find dates that like the same movies?  

Hacking Netflix: "Some of my Netflix Friends have rated thousands of movies, written scores of reviews, and have hundreds of movies in their queue."