Scott Karp: Relevancy is Not a Commodity

In a post on Google Checkout ("...a very 1.0 shopping engine...feels like Yahoo circa 1997..."), Scott Karp also levels a more substantive criticism at the model:

I don’t want an algorithm and a bunch of ad copywriters determining what’s "relevant" for me. I want my peers — people like me — to determine what’s relevant.

I agree. And I'd argue that the starting point in building the infrastructure needed to allow our peers to determine what's relevant for us--and to allow us to do the same for them--is capturing our own attention data. By controlling our own data, we'll be free to decide for ourselves what's relevant. We'll plug our data into any number of different services, and if we find their results useful, great--if not, we'll take our data and move on. And within the confines of any one service, we should have the ability to determine the appropriate context for correlation--compare our data with everyone's? With people from our social networks? Just with a small, predefined group?

My larger point is simply that controlling our data is the first step toward being able to choose for ourselves. If we control our data, service providers will be compelled to give us options in order to compete for access to that data. If we don't, they won't.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+economy attention+data scott+karp google+checkout