Via David Weinberg, I ran across this post from Jeneane Sessum - who has a fair amount of cynicism built up on the whole attention/gesture thing:

Although this attention thing sounds a little good and a little creepy at the same time, it is essentially as it always has always been: anyone concerned with what you’re paying attention to is out to make money off of you. Trying to paint attention monitoring or tracking or trust or what have you as anything other than that is dishonest. You and I are not that important. No one, I mean no one, besides a suspicious mate cares what you pay attention to online unless they’re looking to divorce some bread from your wallet.

Pretty much, yeah. She goes on, and the rest of her post is worth reading - follow the link for it. The funny thing is, not only is attention/gesture a silly way to extract information worth selling - but, as I said the other day, the proposed business model for it flopped like a fish out of water back in the late 90's. It's an idea whose time tried to come, and wasn't worth waiting for.