APML of course reminisces of OPML files, but it’s focused on an individual person’s granular attention profile. Web services can import such profiles and change their behavior acccording to preferences and interests, similar to how Amazon’s recommendations are different depending on your purchasing history and interest profile.

Over the last few days the people behind Touchstone Live seem to have successfully pitched a couple of A-list bloggers about their genuine APML.ORG initiative: a website that proposes to reach agreement on establishing a new standard for an attention profiling mark-up language.

The APML standard (100KB PDF) is a means to describe people’s interests and attention behavior, mining, analyzing and compressing data from a user’s browser history, from email messages, documents, log files, feed reading lists, custom keywords, tags and bookmarks and other personalized data.

APML of course reminisces of OPML files, but it’s focused on an individual person’s granular attention profile. Web services can import the profile and change their behavior acccording to that person’s preferences, similar to how Amazon’s recommendations are different depending on your purchasing history and interest profile.

This is only the beginning of a very interesting conversation: I expect people like Dave Winer, Alex Barnett, Niall Kennedy, Seth Goldstein and of course all those involved in the Attention Trust will participate and collaborate with good spirit in the workgroup that is facilitated by the public APML discussion forum.

Here’s a quick-and-dirty topic radar that tracks the APML meme: