David Leonhardt and Rishi Khaitan on Google Trends

In this morning's New York Times, David Leonhardt sees Google Trends, the recently launched service that allows users "to check the relative popularity of any search term, to look at how it has changed over the last couple years and to see the cities where the term is most popular," as a significant step toward the realization of John Battelle's vision of a Database of Intentions.

Rishi Khaitan has some further thoughts on the same subject:

The big question is, should you have to pay for this [Google Trends] data? The Attention Trust guys (of which I am a member) would likely say no. After all, why should a company profit off of you by recording your search behavior? Or atleast if they do profit, they definitely should make the same freely data available to users of the service. My guess is that Google will keep the Trends service free but charge for API access to the data. I don’t believe an API exists yet but you gotta know it’s coming.

That is a big question, but speaking personally, I think the answer's a little more complicated than just "yes" or "no." Should you have the right to control the attention data that you create, such as the data that reflects your search behavior? Yes, that's one of AttentionTrust's founding principles. But does that right extend to free access to data created by other people and aggregated by a third-party service? Again, speaking personally, that seems less a matter of principle and more an issue that should be determined by market forces.

But at a more fundamental level, I think we sidestep the issue entirely by empowering people to capture their own attention data (including, but not limited to, their search behavior) so that they can put it to use for their own purposes. With the necessary infrastructure in place (including transparent and highly user-friendly tools), we could share our attention data only with third parties that 1) provide us with a useful service or something of value in return and 2) respect our rights to own, manage, store and delete our data as we see fit.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+economy attention+data google+trends david+leonhardt rishi+khaitan