An attention stream is like a group-edited newswire built using an agreed upon tag to designate items found online as of interest to the group subscribed to the stream.

Though subscribers usually use its RSS feed, it is possible to recieve an attention stream by email as well (for example with Feedburner‘s partner service Feedblitz).

To get an idea what this looks like, here are posts I’ve made about two attention streams I participate in:

NPTech, an attention stream for items of interest to non profit technologists. The feed itself is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/NptechMetaFeed. Feel free to click on that link to see the newest items submitted.

WebJustice2.0, a news wire and repository for items online related to gender, class, racial and other types of inequities in the emerging Web 2.0 world. The feed itself (the prior link is to an explanation of it) is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/webjustice20.

If you have a community of interest online, whose members are familiar enough with the tools involved, you can create an attention stream on any subject. You just need an agreed upon and arbitrary tag to designate items for the stream. Further instructions for a feed creator can be found in either of the posts linked to above.