Living in an
attention economy is a natural
byproduct of living in an
information society. In an
environment where
ideas or
memes are the main
currency, ideas naturally compete for
survival in the
mind, which leads up to the first principle:
Your interest is a commodity.
People will pay for you to read things, see things, and think about the things that they want thought about. Sometimes they want you to buy things from them, but this is not as important as establishing a name and making sure that their meme survives in the memepool; if you know about it you may tell someone else. If no-one knows about it, it's not cool.
There are some companies that compete very effectively for your attention. Think Levis, think Wasssssup, think different. They aren't trying to get you to buy from them immediately -- they just want you to remember them so when you DO buy, they'll be one of the first things you think of. Advertising is not a great way of remembering things -- can you remember any advertisements afterwards?
The internet fucked this up good and proper. Now instead of newspapers and television competing for our attention, we have many, many sources of attention, funneled through weblogs like slashdot and portals like Yahoo. And then you have things like the drudge report.
Attention is cool. Everyone hates to be bored, and anything without attention doesn't live very long.