APML, a new standardized format for expressing attention preferences, has been receiving a lot of buzz in recent weeks. Mashable covers the topic here, Brad Feld here, Jeff Nolan here, and Read/WriteWeb here.

It’s great to see an increasing number of folks getting behind the concept of ‘standardized structured attention’ and embracing this emerging standard.

Attention has always been a topic of interest to me, something I’ve blogged about in the past, on a number of occasions. At my company Orchestr8, we’ve been working on solutions that can automatically capture the ‘context’ of a user’s attention and leverage this data in various ways. We’re currently implementing APML support into the next version of our software, which should provide for some really interesting capabilities.

The thing that excites me about APML is that it’s a relatively straight-forward standard (far, far simpler than the many RSS/ATOM variants). This will ease adoption and simplify portability of attention preference data across many products / services. Since APML expresses attention in a relatively abstract way, multiple products (even product domains, for instance Web versus Email) can leverage the same attention data.

Additional tech. note: Thank you, APML authors, for strictly standardizing the date format in the APML spec (ISO8601). If only we could have been so lucky with RSS/ATOM. Now lets hope people actually stick to the date formats!