Is your attention important? Google is patenting the display of it, the search engine journal is reporting today.

Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft, we better pay attention to this stuff! Steve Gillmor, we gotta get into AttentionTrust.org and figure out how to deal with attention data and make sure that customers and developers can build attention applications without paying Google.

Why is that important? Well, imagine a world where the map component, the advertising component, and other components on your Web page report back to Google what you are giving your attention to (and they will, I guarantee that!)

Then, who will be able to display the results of where you gave your attention? Only Google.