Photo by Scott Beale

Nick Douglas of Valleywag has left the building. The talented and sometimes controversial writer is no longer the lead editor at Valleywag, and, they are looking to fill his shoes.

Valleywag says

Nick Douglas, editor since launch earlier this year, is leaving. […] Nick Douglas, the kid we plucked from college to launch Valleywag, will be a great journalist. And we will look stupid for letting him go. (To reach Nick Douglas, send email to popsnap at gmail dot com.) But, to helm the site, we’re now looking for someone with, ideally, some background in reporting.

For a blog that tries to reveal everything about industry gossip and secrets, they’re certainly keeping Nick Douglas’s departure rather low key. He really was the voice of Valleywag, and, even though I don’t usually read it everyday, I enjoyed his witty banter on the state of Web 2.0 gossip. It won’t be the same without him.

Now, he can start his own blog, and, I’m sure that the first entry will be about the circumstances of departure from VW.

Also, VW has also redesigned their page, and oh, what a horrible redesign it is. They say that the original design of VW was weak, but, I think that it’s not only weaker now, it’s bad on the eyes. The original design was one of my favorites in the gawker regime.

Will this be the start of the decline of VW? Nick really had the personality within the Web 2.0 world, and, his departure will leave the new guy with a lot of catching up to do.

When I first met David Marks at the STIRR mixer, I didn’t think he looked anything like Hunter S. Thompson. When I saw his picture on the Loomia website, I immediately saw a resemblance–if only in dress. 

David, a pilot in his spare time, co-founded Loomia two years ago. As a big fan of underground music, he created a crawler to find good (and I mean good to him personally) music on blogs. Unfortunately, what he found is that he only enjoyed about 1/10 of the music he was finding. He decided there had to be a better way to find stuff he liked, so he created an RSS-based program that gathered data about what he was already listening to (implicit data), and allowed him to rate the stuff he liked the most (explicit data). Eventually, the program would know him so well that it would be able to bring the music that he liked most directly to him.

Loomia’s product is an updated version of that program which helps users find the most personally relevant content on media sites, and the best products on Etailer sites. If you’ve read my blog entry on Ed Batista, you might notice several similarities between the two concepts. The difference is that AttentionTrust helps you learn more about yourself by tracking and giving you your own data to store, while Loomia helps specific sites provide you with the best content or products anonymously by IP address. And while AttentionTrust is non-profit, and Loomia is for profit, they both have the personalization of user content as an underlying theme for their products.

Since Loomia started as a way to find music David liked, I was interested to find out what he was listening to the most lately. One of his current favorites is an African congo band called Konono 1. They have a very interesting sound; you should check them out. 

In addition to being a pilot, David is also a trained acrobat who has played the Cello since childhood. Some of his past work experience includes helping run an online political campaign for Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich, and helping his friend, David McMurtry, set up a blog to raise money and awareness for Colombians who’ve lost thier houses to civil war. It’s no surprise that David’s startup would be one that aimed to help people!

The first thing you’ll notice about Ed Batista is his intent look, his piercing blue eyes. He is focused; he wants to be sure you understand exactly why it is so important to know where you’re spending your attention. That’s right, spending, like money. And like money, attention has an economy of its own.

Ed is the Executive Director of AttentionTrust.org, a non-profit organization that has these guiding principles. AttentionTrust exists to promote the principle that each of us should own and control the attention data that we create, so that we can decide for ourselves how it can best be put to use.

While Ed enjoys hiking, exploring the SF Bay Area, and taking photographs, it is obvious that his true passion is the future of the attention economy. Here’s why:

1. You will gain a better understanding of yourself. He compares it to a credit card statement at the end of a year. They allocate, sometimes by percent, how much you’re spending on food, on bills, at the movies, and, in my case, how much on golf. The Attention Recorder does the same. How much attention are you paying to ESPN.com, and  CNET.com, versus blogs, Flickr, and BuzzShout? You might be surprised.
2. By tracking your attention, you will eventually be able to connect to the content that is most relevant to you. For instance, you could share previous page views and purchase histories with any or all of the retailers that you use, so that you’d get personalized recommendations from your very first visit to their site. Or you could share data regarding the posts and articles you read, or the podcasts and music you listen to, with any media site of your choosing. They would then be able to direct you to new content that’s very relevant to your interests
3. In the future, marketing and advertising will be more relevant to what you want. Imagine if an ad wasn’t an intrusion, but relevant content about something you wanted to find out more information about.
4. Someday you can use the attention data to help create an in-depth profile of yourself in order to find people with similar interests. Imagine the future of dating, or of finding like-minded friends, or even business partners. Of course, who we are isn’t completely made up of where we spend our attention, but it is a strong indicator of our interests, and would therefore be extremely useful in matching us with similar people.

According to Ed, “The continued development of services that make use of our attention data is inevitable. Whether those services are developed in such a way that reflects what’s in our best interests as individuals, is an open question.”

It’s a question that we can answer. I’ll assume that mostly early adopters are reading this blog entry. We’re the people who understand what Web 2.0 is, who want to find what new applications and ideas are out there, who daydream about what the web can grow into. Go to AttentionTrust.org sometime, and spend some of your attention finding out about the Attention Recorder . In doing so, you’ll be one step closer to changing the future, so that we’ll all live in an individually customized world.