Given that the O'Reilly organization is latching onto the term, and Matt Webb has significantly expounded upon it, attentuation will be the next hot buzzword. Looking at the strict dictionary definition, I'm not sure that's actually a positive thing , but I believe they're focusing more on the engineering sense: reduction of signal amplitude to focus attention, which is a good thing.
While I think Webb's piece could benefit from a bit of attenuation itself, it usefully highlights how a number of mechanisms we use on real life to manage huge flows of information, haven't migrated into our Web based media. Thus there are huge design and implementation opportunities and challenges still to be exploited.
One of the attenuation/locality mechanisms that I've been pondering a bit is the power of temporal organization. The good old calendar and timeline have been dismissed recently in the weblog world as being non-functional, but I think there's a second breath of life for them. If small calendars become a bit more interactive (read AJAXy), the social norms and understandings we bring to them are pretty powerful.
For the most part, you don't have to teach people how to navigate a calendar, and a well designed, compact, interface like Bederson's DateLens provides a nice gateway to any number of underlying data icebergs. Out of the box it's a focus+context inteface using time as an attenuation device. In addition, people immediately bring their own landmarks (birthdays, deadlines, holidays, conferences, anniversaries) to the landscape.
Lots of mileage still to be traveled.