Eric Hayes, Attensa co-founder and VP of R&D is now a co-author of the Attention.xml spec. Eric joins David Sifry, Kevin Marks, and Tantek Çelik in helping to define the Attention.XML open standard designed to help keep track of what you've read, what you're spending time on, and what you should be paying attention to.

Steve Gillmor and Dave Sifry have been collaborating on the concept of attention.xml since 2003.

Here's a great Corante podcast featuring and interview with Eric, Dave and Steve on the topic of attention.

Watching people light up during the demos of  Attensa for Outlook 0.96 at the Gnomedex Conference in Seattle was gratifying and informative. We got great feedback on the user experience and great suggestions for new features.

The features that earned the most oooohs and aaaaahs are:

• automatically loading audio Podcast files into iTunes and Windows Media Player playlists
• The Firefox or Microsoft Internet Explorer toolbars that make it easy to add and manage RSS news feeds and subscriptions
  
• Automatic blog publishing from emails and news feed articles directly to their blogs or wikis without exiting Outlook and loading their browser.

The public preview version 0.96 of Attensa for Outlook can be downloaded for free at http://www.attensa.com.

Last Friday and Saturday Gnomedex was the center of the RSS universe. We took the opportunity will announce a new company, a new vision and a new product.

The new company is Attensa and we are dedicating all of our energies to building a comprehensive RSS network. Here's the news release describing the vision and product line.