I recently installed Firefox 1.5 RC3. It's stable as a damn rock and most of my extensions either updated or worked immediately. Most of them. I was very disappointed that Aardvark wasn't working. Firefox 1.5 disabled most incompatible extensions, but left Aardvark in play and in my right-click menu, it just didn't... work anymore.

Well, it finally got to be too much to bear. As much as I adore the SlayerOffice MODI2 dom inspector (also availble as part of Steve's outstanding Favelet Suite), but it just doesn't match the ease of use of Aardvark. I finally went and google for an answer, and sure enough, there was one.

From Wordpress support:
Download a working updated .xpi from here:
http://nmi.ath.cx/~seb/aardvark.xpi - and if that server's down, try this:
http://ka2er.free.fr/files/aardvark.xpi

"They could be a great people, they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason, above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them [my] only son."- Superman Returns trailer

There has been a good amount of concern and criticism about the upcoming adaptation of C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first book in Chronicles of Narnia series, but I'm wondering if christian ideologies might be finding their way into the cinema under cover of blue tights, rather than in the form of a CG lion. I wonder if there was any concern over this line when it was first uttered by Marlon Brando in 1979's Superman? See the trailer here: Superman Returns Trailer

On some level, the ultimate promise of the web has always been truly personalizable marketing. The web offered the first portal through which truly unique advertising experiences could be provided to each user, and could be more accurately targeted to that user's interests and habits, hopefully increasing the chances that she will click on the banner or add to her shopping cart. The missing link here is the mechanism by which the advertisers collect information about users to use in tailoring these custom ad experiences. To this end, information hungry vendors have been finding cleverer and sneakier ways to record our browsing, viewing, listening, and consumption habits -- to record where our attention is being spent.

AttentionTrust seeks to retain that information as a user's own property. The argument is essentially that if companies are benefitting from this information, that it has value. If it has value, is a commodity, and has an owner who must be compensated. This seems to me like a new take on an old debate. This is less a privacy concern (although proivacy certainly factors in), and more of a fair trade issue.

Herman Simon once said:

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."(via Bokardo).

This view clearly denotes attention as a quantifiable commodity, which AttentionTrust President Steve Gilmour has dubbed "Attention Metadata". It could be easily argued that the sale of Attention Metadata would benefit advertisers as much as users. Rather than spend money on developing clever ways to encapsulate and then analyze searches, browsing habits, click patterns, or even email messages -- and then spend money in court defending these practices -- the money would go more directly to the users, who would provide cleaner, more useful data. The user, in turn, would get a more personalized ad experience, increased transparency as to who has what information, and some sort of compensation.

I have enrolled with AttentionTrust and I'll be very excited to see how far they can take the issue.