Amazon profiles you by the books you buy. Google sponsored links are displayed by the contents of your gmail e-mails and general website interests. All “Big Brother” considerations aside – this is clever – or at least technically interesting. There are risks of evil marketeers profiling you down to the bone, but on the other hand you probably only see stuff that is interesting to you – as opposed to receiving a load of Viagra spam e-mails. I know – The fact that something really sucks, does not make something that sucks a bit less excellent..
A group is in the process of specifying the APML format. APML is short for Attention Profile Markup Language and will specify a fileformat to express your interests ranked. OPML can already be considered an APML subset describing your feed subscriptions, but APML i more of an aggregation of your interests also including e-mail, browser history and bookmarks.
An important thing about your attention profile is, that is has value – to you as well as to others. Check out AttentionTrust for more..