Somebody's Watching Me

I just grabbed theattention trust recorder, something I've been meaning to do since we interviewed Seth.

A nice easy firefox extension install later, I am now perpetually creating an .xml file of my clickstream, both on my hardrive and at the Root Vaults, where I can play with my data and learn more about my online identity.

Extremely important with a tool like this, turning it OFF is really easy. On click and the green diamond on my toolbar becomes a red box, and my stream goes unrecorded.

Engaging in this exercise made me realize how many different ways you can use rss to look at me online:

Anyone who wants to can set their RSS reader to:

watch my daily show

read this blog

see what sites I'm bookmarking, and who's tagging with my name

see what people are saying about this blog

see what people are saying about wallstrip

Who's going to monitor all those things? Probably just me and the FBI. My wife? Please. And anyone else, well that would just be creepy.

In The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, the title case study is about a man who lost his ability to interpret what he saw. He had no trouble seeing, and described abstract shapes perfectly. But when it came to interepreting and contextualizing that data, he was at a loss. An autistic brain can only analyze what is concrete. Conversely, his brain could only think in the abstract, and so he couldn't discern by site the difference between his wife's head and his bowler.

Right now, attention tracking is sort of like that man's brain. Once we develop tools to contextualize and interpret that data, an observation like, "Adam seems blue today" will be something that can be concluded not only by seeing me and interacting with me in person, but also from my web presence. That's pretty cool.