Recording just *which* pages you visit is a good start on tracking your attention, really leveraging your attention is going to require more flexible and complete tracking. The easiest place to expand on the basics that the AttentionTrust Firefox plugin and sample server provide is to build your own server from scratch. The information below talks about how the existing extension works. With this information, most web developers should be able to implement a server that clones the existing sample server in pretty much any programming language or data storage method.
The data is posted to the server "raw". In PHP, this means that $_POST array is empty because there are no name/value pairs. Instead, the toolkit uses the "php://input" method of grabbing the raw posted data. That interface is documented at: http://us2.php.net/wrappers.php.
The contents of that raw POST is an XML string that looks like this:
<attention xmlns="http://attentiontrust.org/attention/ns#" version="0.11" recorderGUID="{7118cc65-ee56-4af0-b5fc-37205e1bc61e}" recorderVersion="0.16">
<httptransactions>
<httptransaction>
<title>The Glass is Too Big - J Wynia</title>
<url>http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/</url>
<cookie>0</cookie>
<setcookie>0</setcookie>
<responsecode>0</responsecode>
<method>CACHE</method>
<date>Sun, 05 Mar 2006 13:41:22 GMT</date>
</httptransaction>
</httptransactions>
</attention>
The rest of the request just comes through as a regular web request. This means that you can use your normal cookie or other authentication mechanisms. If you have the user visit some control panel and set up a lifetime cookie via a regular web page that the extension/browser will also make available on the tracking posts.
As such, you can see that just doing a quick parse of that XML and you can save the data wherever you want. In a single user system, just put some HTTP authentication on it and you'd be done. For multiple users, you'd just need to do what the sample server did, which is set the user id as a permenant cookie.
All in all, a pretty simple server. I'm not putting up code to a full-blown prototype for a specific reason.
While the existing extension is useful, it doesn't capture (or offer easy ways to capture) more that basic "this URL was loaded" type of recording. There's no way to track how long a page was the primary window, no way of tracking what the text under the mouse was when you clicked, etc.
As a result, I actually want to see a different, more flexible client before I write my own server. At that point, I'll probably make it compatible with the existing client, but also support the other mode too.
At any rate, if you were intrigued by the sample toolkit, but wanted a little more info on how it works, this should get you going.
Now, on to building that better client.
