I was reading an explanation of AttentionTrust.org goals and got a bunch of related concepts on my mind. For now I throw them to you embedded in bold in this chaotic post, in future I guess there will be a microformat for giving semantics to the relationships between these concepts. [I also guess that for most of the concept words, you can lead to the related wikipedia page and find a compelling ongoing description (and probably a greasemonkey script that converts all the words that are no links to links to wikipedia page is already available somewhere)]

From AttentionTrust.org: a Declaration of Gestural Independence:
if the attention I pay to others is valued in proportion to the amount of attention earned by me, then an accounting system is set in motion which quotes something like the social share prices of individual attention.
PageRank of attention, actually better named AttentionRank.
Cyberspace is where the new kind of economy comes into its own. Like any economy the new one is based on what is both most desirable and ultimately most scarce, and now this is the attention that comes from other people.
Attention is scarce because each of us has only so much of it to give, and it can come only from us — not machines, computers or anywhere else.
Unlike the old matter-based wealth, the new wealth is nothing you can hope to put under lock and key. You get it by reaching out into the world.
Attention Economy, Whuffie
Wealth therefore comes to you by expressing yourself fully. The best guarantee you have for attention going to you for what you do is living your life as openly as possible, expressing yourself as publicly as possible as early as possible (hence it makes sense to put out drafts, early versions, so there are witnesses for everything you do.)
free software phylosophy, release early, release often
So the new privacy and the old are direct opposite. The new privacy means having no secrets, which you don’t normally need to have, because little that was previously shameful or had to be concealed is so now…
sousveillance
What people do demand as privacy now is freedom from having to pay attention, not from being seen but seeing what they don’t want to.
daily me / tiranny of the majority
The first move in establishing an open market for Attention was to declare a set of basic rights: Property: I own my attention and I can store it securely in private.
Mobility: I can move my attention wherever I want whenever I want to.
Economy: I can pay attention to whomever I wish and be paid for it.
Transparency: I can see how my attention is being used
These represent our rights as attention owners.
(…) In any case, by virtue of recognizing the above-listed rights, members of the AttentionTrust (both individual and corporate) express their participation in a free, open market for exchanging their attention.
alternative economy, emerging democracy
Like so many Web applications, but on a much grander scale, Google takes what I am looking for (literally my attention) and turns it into a commodity called a keyword, which in turn gets pooled and traded by advertisers and publishers who don’t give me anything in return but do subsidize my use of Google search, my storage in Gmail, etc.
Interesting discussion of what Google company really is (related to the scary list of what Google knows about you).

And yes, I’m paying attention to the post I commented here and, recursively, if you paid attention to this post, I’m asking/suggesting to pay attention to the post I commented here. Are you paying something to me? Am I paying something to you? Is there anyone out there reading this? If not, who is paying who? Well, I guess some answers will come from AttentionTrust.org and for now I just paid attention…

Via Many2Many, I learn that Yahoo has a new gift for us: My Web 2.0 BETA – A Social Search Engine.
On Yahoo! Search Blog there is an introduction to the new service:
Almost two years ago, one of our engineers was interested in buying a plasma TV and tried using web search to find a good site for reviews — a quick search revealed that there were hundreds of sites offering to educate him on plasma TVs, yet short of visiting all the sites, it was difficult to figure out which site exactly was the ‘best’ site. So he did what millions of people do every day – asked a friend, who recommended two excellent sites for plasma TV reviews. He never ended up buying a TV (things just got too busy with search), but this was the moment of inspiration that lead us to build the product we are introducing today – a social search engine that enables people to search the expertise of their friends and community. [Read the rest on Yahoo! Search Blog]
All this trust-enhanced search and filtering and recommendations is what I’m trying to do with my PhD and I’m happy it is really taking off. About technology and metrics, they propose MyRank, as a successor of global trust metrics such as PageRank or the more recent TrustRank.
I didn’t play with it for now. And I really hope that Yahoo! is going to embrace the Open Web with this new service by giving Open API and export facilities (at the moment it seems so and I’m sure Flickr guys are going to suggest the right moves about that).
Ken Norton is collecting reactions from the blogosphere, or you can monitor who is speaking about My Web 2.0 on Technorati or BlogLines.
Otherwise read My Web 2.0 Blog (first post is by our great flickresque friend Caterina Fake).