Andrew Teman recently posted a tirade against Attention Trust, citing this article by Seth Goldstein. To Andrew, this article made no sense. It was a company forming around a bunch of doublespeak, with no business plan, nothing. It’s almost like the 1990-era dot com boom all over again. I tend to agree. Andy calls for anyone to read that article and summarize what they do in fifty words or less.

Here it is, my fifty-words or less on what the article means: the effort of seeing stuff online should be treated as capital. There, I did it in eleven words. That doesn’t change the fact that this is a bunch of nonsense.

The idea they’re trying to play up is that machines are automating the process of demographic profiling and targeting. This is not only true, it’s efficient. They’re trying to place the targeting back in the consumer’s hands, to let them “traffick” in their “attention”, as it were.

This also, is nonsense.

There is no need to set up an attention trust, as it were, to let people treat their attention as currency. This already happens. We don’t call it attention currency, and we don’t need to. We do it automatically. The idea of “brokering” your attention is absolutely rediculous. What are they going to do, say “If you read this page, I’ll read that one”? This not only is not only dumb, it reduces the value placed on attention itself: it’s less valuable to have forced attention. Think of it this way: would it be more valuable to have someone who searched and found your site, or to have someone who was just pointed there?

About the only value I see here is the potential to build on word of mouth referrals. This is not a new concept either.

The kicker here is the lack of a true business plan. It’s like a bunch of people got together, got high, and said, “Whoa, think about the Internet and people and stuff. We should do something with that.” Providing textual references and vague ideas will get you nowhere, except, I guess, with the blindly investing VCers. They could have redeemed themselves by giving an inkling of how this was going to provide value to anyone.