Jim Cuene has a good breakdown of the ideas behind the concept of attention, as in AttentionTrust and Attention.XML. Think of all the tracks we're leaving as we wend our way across ye olde interwebs. Think of the vast potential to harness that information and do something useful with it — building tools that clue us in to the emerging trends in our own mindscapes and point us in new directions that would be of great use to us, as well as tools that allow us to share the details of our interests with our families, friends and colleagues. Think of the vast potential to harness that information and do bad things with it — sell it to fleabag marketers and spammers who have no scruples about the methods they use to gain even the tiniest slice of our attention.

As Jim points out, many of us are at this point hyper-aware of how companies are treating us, talking to us (or not), marketing to us, and how by turns invasive or respectful those conversations are. It is only going to become more crucial over time that we demand the right to have some measure of control over that kind of individual attention data, and that companies commit to transparency over how they're using our information. AttentionTrust and Attention.xml are focused on "creating a) awareness that there's an explicit and implicit shared ownership of users' attention and b) a technical format for sharing and brokering that attention."