I listened to the latest Gillmor Gang podcast (Trust Gang Part IV) today, and in segment 4, Seth Goldstein talked about where he's headed with the Root Markets idea. I've never completely bought into the whole idea of "attention streams", but the explanation of where this is going reminded me of something:

Remember beanz, digicash, and flooz (internet cash)? The idea was that you signed up with a company, and then you exchanged something (access to your personal information, typically) in exchange for "internet cash". You could then go to online vendors and exchange that digital cash for real goods. Except... vendors didn't want beanz, they wanted Visa. Or Mastercard. Or... you get the idea.

The gang was hung up on what I'd consider the trivial point - you would have to trust Root Markets well enough to let them manage your "attention data" (the history of what you visit on the web). Heck, we already trust Google, Yahoo, and our ISPs with that data (at least implicitly). The harder question is, why would a vendor of widgets want to take "root beanz" instead of a credit card? To some extent, this tells me that "Web 2.0" is headed for the weeds in the same way that "Web 1.0" did. When people start running back to already rejected ideas, it's a bad sign.

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