Intent web (attention economy) ready to go

Matthew Kumin blog post entitled The Web of Intent is Coming (sooner than you think) gives an excellent introduction on how the next generation of tools for individuals will bring the web of Intent to the fore.  He lists 1 to 5 the key ingredients of the changes, its interesting to note the use of the word ‘integrated’, it appears in connection with the ‘integration of search and publishing’.  In fact 4 of the 5 bullet points talk about Publishing, only bullet point 5 focuses solely on the individual and it is bullet point no. 5 that fits in with the goals of the lifestylelinking project.

It is surprising to see the publishing side of the question so prominent.  I think the reason for this presentation of Intent by Matthew is because he knows the publishers (any author of content)  wants to contribute and participate in the right context online, thus the integration of the search side gives them this view.  However, if each individual has their own no. 5 ‘curated feeds’ then they would have all the information they require to author their contributions.  The other reason I can think of is that there is a school of thought that the current authoring CMS (content management tools) could do better at expressing the intent of the publisher, wrapping the text in tags or an ontology for the linked data community etc.   The observation to provide here is that the text, ie the words the author expresses is the most important articulation in the whole publishing process and subsequent ‘markup’ or ‘tagging’ is secondary to the communication expressed by the publisher.  This should not be forgotten, the primary intent of the author is what they author not what they wrap it in.

Tags: attention, economy, intent