February 28th, 2006

Apple Scruffs

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 10:08 am

Categories: RSS

Tags:

Once again we are all gathered together, this time at Apple, for Steve Jobs’ Magical Mystery Tour. Dan Farber sits next to me with no WiFi while I zoom out on EVDO.

 

Photos: Dan Farber

• medium sized announcements
• Mac Mini
• Intel Core Solo $599
• 2.5x
• floating point 3x
• Also Dual Core 5x integer and 5.5 floating
• FrontRow bundled
• IR sensor, remote
• demo: "forgot to load content"
• Bonjour - shared music
• finds Shiller’s MBP over wireless, plays, skips thru
• shares photos
• videos Desperate Hwives

• 1 billion tunes sold
• iPod leather cases $99
• home stereo quality?
• iPod Hi-Fi hsq reinvented
• universal iPod dock
• integrated power supply
• 6 D batteries
• Ported bass reflex design - no distortion
• sealed resin enclosure
• speaker update in iPod menu
• Apple remote
• 2 80 mm midrange drivers
• 130 mm dual voice coil woofer
• $349
• Run…

February 19th, 2006

Office Still Dead

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 1:42 pm

Categories: RSS

Tags:

Watching That’s So Raven with my 5 yr old Ella. It’s slowly dawning on me that there are only 5 shows in the can. I’ve seen this one so many times I’ve taken to watching the passers-by extras’ feet when the front door opens to see if they are using one guy over and over (nope, two guys.) Raven’s hook: she has visions, little flashes of the future which she spends the rest of the episode running down with appropriate hijinks ensuing.

Also Gchatting with Dan Farber, who is "suggesting" I condense my "Office is Dead" further to appeal to what he calls "us Simpletons." Of course, Dan knows I’m just making this up as I go along, but what he resists knowing is that so does everybody else, including Steve Sinofsky. Steve Sinofsky is a blogger who posts screen shots of the new Office Dead interface, which is confusingly called WIndows Live Mail, when he’s not busy being the Office Dead VP in charge of working for Jeff Raikes, now head of the Office Dead Business as Usual division.

If we accept the notion that all of this blogosphere thing is fiction, i.e. making the whole thing up as we go along, then seeing the future is not difficult for any of us, let alone Raven. It then behooves us to examine the development environment for clues as to what comes next, since, if we’re making all this up as we go along, then methodology has a great deal to do with what parts of the elephant we see first. Take this post, for example. Though it often appears at the end of the production cycle, like some sort of Saturday afternoon presidential radio address, in fact it is produced in much the same way that Doc Searls’ blog scrolls into view.

Doc’s blog appears in news desk chunks, waxing and waning based on a combination of the previous day’s unfinished business, continuing thematic excursions, troll maintenance, and link payoffs. No, really. Gatekeeping is a tough job, but someone has to do it. What, you say, does this have to do with Office Deadness? Let’s examine the most recent Office Dead packaging announcement, the One where Office Student, Educational Discount Edition (which replaced Office Competitive Free Cigarette Replacement for WordPerfect Killer Edition) has been replaced by Office Dead Home Edition.

Now comes the making it up as we go along part. In an inspired piece worthy of a prime time network programming pinhead putting West Wing on Sunday night to cancel the next administration (something we might want to be afraid of in the so-called real world) the Office Dead braintrust has my emphasis added removed Outlook and replaced it with OneNote. Completists will note that I have been recommending just such a change since the Pleistocene Period as a way of getting ubiquity for OneNote and switching on the XML API that Chris Pratley insisted lurked within in the next version of OneNote when we talked prior to the beginning of the Korean conflict. In other words, get rid of email at the center of the desktop and replace it with an XML (read RSS) inforouter.

CRN’s Barb Darrow went her usual step further and actually got a quote out of the braintrust that brings tears to my eyes:

"Many households already have a Web mail client," [group program manager for Information Worker licensing and pricing at Microsoft Pam] Munsell said. "Anybody can purchase it. You no longer need a student or a teacher in the household, and you can install it on three machines. The price remains $149."

Please go to the board and write AJAX GMail OFFICE DEAD until you run out of chalk. Anybody can install it. Price: $50. And we’ve got some commercials for you if you want the price to go to Zero.

That’s sooo Raven. 

February 18th, 2006

Attention Thieves

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 6:36 pm

Categories: RSS

Tags:

I’ve developed a new spray that detects bullshit. I can’t talk too much about the technology until the product launch, but I will demonstrate its usefullness by spraying it on this post by Sam Ruby:

Note that there’s nothing left to see. The way my invention works, it erases all bullshit from the target post. I was somewhat surprised to see Nick Bradbury’s quote removed, but a quick trip to the original reveals that Sam has evidently invented a similar spray that removes elements of quotes that tend to contradict his agenda. No wonder it’s called an Atomizing spray.

This kind of attention theft is becoming more commonplace as strides are made in improving information feeds through the applied use of attention metadata. The bullshit industry is fighting back with misdirection, credit phishing, protocol snatching, and complexity multiplexing. I’m currently working on an update to the spray that will incorporate these signatures into the detection filters, but for now the beta has a hard time with certain posts from bloggers whose last names begin with "B", and everything from Bob Sutor.

Many people have asked what the business model will be for the new product. The basic product will remain free, but those who want to permanently apply the spray to all feeds and items will need the Pro version, which will priced on a sliding scale based on an analysis of your bullshit output, or bput. Unfortunately, I’m using the Pro version alpha, so I can’t pull up any examples of people who won’t be able to afford the product. But don’t worry, they know who they are.

 

February 17th, 2006

Gillmor Daily gets Sirius

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 7:35 pm

Categories: Gillmor Daily, Gillmor Gang, Podcasts, RSS

Tags:

Gillmor Daily has moved into AttentionTech’s slot on Sirius, beginning with last week’s shows. Monday and Tuesday featured a two part version of my conversation with new Gang regular Mike Arrington. Wednesday and Thursday emanated from OSBC, with Stephen O’Grady from Redmonk and Dan Farber on the 15th and former Linux Journal and now SpikeSourcian Don Marti on the 16th. Friday Farber joined again to chat with Steve Rubel from NY on his move to Edleman and the New PR.

AttentionTech continues on the Net with new shows beginning again next week. And Nick Carr joins the Gillmor Gang recorded Friday, to be posted later tonight or tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening. 

February 15th, 2006

Havana Bob

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 6:14 pm

Categories: RSS

Tags:

I’m sitting in the bar of the Argent Hotel with Dan Farber. He’s just come from a concluding ODBC panel on open source and (vs) open standards with among others, Bob Sutor and Tim Bray. I saw Tim last night at Sun’s sushi party where he told me that of course he’s partisan and that I should get used to it or some such sentiment. He also says Atom is gonna win. At least he believes in what he’s doing and is transparent about it.

Sutor on the other hand goes way beyond partisan. Take this quote courtesy of the Human Transcriber (Farber) "SOA is coming like a Mac truck for reformulating systems. The only way it works is with open standards." This from the guy who singlehandedly locked Sun out of the WS-I for two years. Of course, reformulating is the code word for IGS, IBM’s global reformation of this week’s IT in a new, soon to be reformulated again framework.

After the marketplace forced Sutor out of his bunker to establish a sham election where Sun graduated to WS-I non-founder but real important because they just are status, he popped up as head of Websphere Reformulation Services. Now he’s back in charge of IBM standards. Have another cigar Bob.

February 14th, 2006

Hey Bulldog

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 12:17 pm

Categories: RSS

Tags:

Ran into Sun’s most authoratative blogger at OSBC this morning: Jim Grisanzio. Although some would point at Tim Bray (too partisan around Atom to sustain deserved linkcred from pre-Sun days) or Simon Phipps (fragmented his Webmink brand into multiple feeds) Jim’s combination of OpenSolaris mission and personal naiviete about his cluefullness and the respect it attracts has kept him closer to the sweet spot of disruptive feed generation. I advised Jim to back off a bit from the All OpenSolaris All the Time, but even so his link posts are worth the price of admission.

Photo: Dan Farber

In introducing Nick Carr at OSBC, program chair Matt Asay called Nick’s and Jonathan Schwartz’ blogs the two best in the ’sphere. Certainly, after a slow start throwing "Doesn’t Matters" at blogging, podcasting, and other A list sacred cows, Nick has grown appreciably into an authorative analyst of the enterprise space at a remarkably deep level for such a generalist. By contrast, Jonathan has devolved from a disruptive force of nature into a constrained pitchman for his Web 2.0 tactics and leading edge business strategies.

To be fair (a little) Jonathan’s success at changing the conversation about open source to one of volume wins has done much to buy him and Sun the time they desperately need to let their superlative hardware seed itself in the marketplace. But the damage to his fundamental platform has been substantial, aided in no small part by the bifurcation of Sun’s messaging into two pieces: McNealy’s Oracle bearhug and Schwartz’ open source mantra.

Thus we see Scott proudly attribute Oracle’s database bundling deal to Sun’s open source database cozying. And Nick Carr’s search for a modern day Samuel Insull to carry IT from cost center to grid dipper just as Insull commoditized electric power in the early 1900’s finds a potential Pied Piper in Schwartz. Surely there’s a story line here that Jonathan could mine to resuscitate his blog or jumpstart the moribund Sun podcasting effort. What’s the problem?

Perhaps Jonathan should examine Nick’s transformation. Just because Carr’s grenade-baiting style works doesn’t mean it’s a perpetual golden goose. Nick was openly dismissive of both the inventment in and authority of blogging, but his continued presence set up an odd dynamic that he eventually confronted–namely, if it sucks so bad, what are you doing here? So his posts became more detailed, nuanced, and broader in their enterprise physiology, to the point where his work set a higher bar for the discussion, above most of the media and with parity to the analyst community. That dovetailed nicely with Redmonk’s and Michael Gartenberg’s move into the trade space for all intents and purposes.

Where then in the world is Jonathan Schwartz? Just because he is president of a large and challenged company is no reason why he can’t move laterally to make his voice work as successfully today as it did when he first appeared. Success is no excuse. Transparency is everything, and Sun’s lack of response to the changing mashup of communications except as a potential source of volume is not a compelling strategy for retaining or growing authority. Jonathan already has the cred of the pioneer, and the respect of the survivor, but he needs to learn the lesson of the Beatles, which is to always change so that the thrill of cracking open the shrink wrap remains.

 

February 7th, 2006

Idiot Wind

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 12:22 pm

Categories: RSS

Tags:

I’ve been debating how to handle this. Do I just ignore it; i.e. send a negative gesture of lack of intent? Or do I play nice and debate the points one by one; i.e. send a neutral gesture of balanced dialogue? Nope.

Stowe Boyd’s post about RSS is flawed. Flawed in that it is totally wrong. Scoble is right. Stowe is not. RSS will continue to dominate and eventually suck all the oxygen out of the glorious Web as we currently adore it. We as in Stowe. What possibly leads Stowe to the conclusion that RSS will not absorb all of the wonderful (sic) Web characteristics like blogrolls, whirling beanies, and other smoke and awe? RSS is the Web, Stowe. It’s the Web on steroids. It saves time. It wins.

It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.

February 5th, 2006

The Dog told me

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 7:42 pm

Categories: RSS

Tags:

I wrote this a few weeks ago before a trip to New York. While getting in and out of cabs or walking down the street, I lost or was relieved of my EVDO card, plunging me back into the darkness that preceded it. I sent this post, along with several additional paragraphs designed to trigger a sense of urgency, to Seth Goldstein, my cofounder of AttentionTrust and CEO of Root Vaults, and Dan Farber, my editor at ZDNet and Gillmor Gang cohort.

Dan responded with a detailed dissection of the piece, generally asking for more detail and supporting facts. Seth wanted less, more simplicity, to get to the underlying fundamentals. They both, of course, are right. Nonetheless, having replaced my EVDO card and waited long enough to provide some of both requests (some Gillmor Gangs and Gillmor Dailys that cover the intervening weeks and a boiled-down abstract for use in my session on Gestures at Etech) this now reads well enough for me to ship it with a few edits:

First, Office is dead. The chorus of "Gillmor is nuts" from Scoble, O’Kelly, Carr et al in no way refutes the facts. I may be nuts, but then so is Bill Gates, who as Scoble pointed out so presciently produced his 2010 future scenario keynote entirely without PowerPoint. Who needs a presentation program when they can demonstrate what they’re talking about with live objects? As Lotus ScreenCam pioneered many years ago, just record the instructions to the screen and audio drivers rather than the bitmaps.

The only problem with the 2010 scenario was that it demoed what is already in play. Portability of data? Gmail. Constant access to data? EVDO. Abstraction of the OS? Ditto. And the actual firmware? Video headsets cost 2X the video iPod today; why does Bill think the Table will ever see Amazon or iKea.live when you can virtualize it with translucent specs that autoswitch to "live" based on a voice or other gesture.

EVDO obviates the rich client. Note I use EVDO as a placeholder for persistent connectivity services. Alchemy-like intelligent caches are all that is necessary for 95% of all behavior on the network. Ajax was initially held back not be its viability but its disruptive impact on Office. Google and Yahoo have no such issues. As Jon Udell notes, our conversation with Brendan Eich on a recent Gillmor Gang shows the roadmap for Firefox virtualization of calendaring presages Google’s entry in the field, the last critical milestone for Office replacement as a core productivity suite. (In the meantime, I’m enjoying SpongeCell, thank you very much. Amazing how quickly Steve Sinofsky posted the Windows Live screenshots, isn’t it…)

Much is made of the entrenched position of Office in the enterprise. Certainly IT wants to maintain control, as does middle management. Microsoft’s move with Office 12 into workflow and potentially RSS will validate some upgrades, but just as Office 97 was driven from the home over the objections of IT, so will GOffice bust through corporate silos as IT attempts to wall cross-domain communications off. Whoever offers users more dynamic, relevant information flow will win. This is the Attention model, and rich has nothing to do with it.

Who is ahead in Attention? Here’s my ranking of the players on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the most evolved:

• Google 9
• Yahoo 8
• MS Live/MSN 8
• Skype/eBay 7
• IAC 7
• Apple 6

There are certainly others (Amazon, Walmart, Comcast) but I’m more interested in the transformation to a Gesture model than relative investment in a post-Office environment. Google ranks high because of all their so-called "beta" marketingware, which derives in aggregate a much more sophisticated attention sample than either their "richness" or revenue suggests. Gtalk is bridgeware across the hardware platform divide–I use it (at least the IM part) across Mac and Tablet seamlessly. Adsense may only be 20% of Google’s current revenue, but it is an enormously potent attention farm as compared to the relatively coarse Adwords model.

Speaking of keywords, splogs have lobotomized keyword feeds without an apparent replacement. As Doc Searls points out on a Gillmor Daily recorded at MacWorld, he no longer tracks blogs or even people, but rather themes, issues, ideas. I’ve noticed posts on the Gillmor Gang forming around subjects (DRM, Attention, Identity) rather than companies (GYM) or even guests (Brendan Eich, Kim Cameron). Faced with qualityglut, we’re searching (pardon the expression) for levers to intermediate the attention stream.

Speaking of levers, let’s look at those same clouds ranked according to Gestures:

• IAC 9
• Skype/eBay 8
• Apple 8
• Yahoo 7
• Google 7
• MS 6

IAC and Apple rank highest because of Bloglines and iTunes, Bloglines because its sample of opt-in gestures (subscriptions) model the blogosphere and iTunes for its albeit skewed modeling of the podosphere. Skype combines its presence and IM signalling data with eBay’s transactional cloud, although the two are not yet intermingled or available via API. Google’s Web Clips feature of the Desktop suffers from its Windows only heritage, but its discovery engine would be highly leveraged if it were made transparent to gestures.

How important these rankings are depends on whether lower ranked players such as the GYM crowd can improve their responsiveness to users, and whether there is a meaningful advantage to be derived from first mover or leadership in the Gesture space. There is much talk in the blogosphere and particularly the VC segment about the supposed commoditization of aggregators, triggered mostly by consolidation (Newsgator/FeedDemon/NetNewsWire) and Microsoft’s entry with Vista at the platform level. Certainly Vista would appear to improve Microsoft’s chances of closing in GestureRank, though the extent that Office diehards slow down RSS penetration may retard that move.

More damaging is Microsoft’s refusal to allow continued support for Windows Media Player on the Mac, ostensibly as a punishment for Jobs’ alleged hardware/software lock-in. To the extent that Firefox provides cross-platform attention farming, neither of these walled gardens are particularly effective ineither squashing or enhancing user control of their metadata. This is significant because the yearning for gestures is driven by the freedom of user control that is growing to outweigh the relatively small delta between reach and rich and OS or application best of breed characteristics. Simply, lock-in is based on lack of transparency, mobility, property, and economy, the four foundational principles of the AttentionTrust.

Or even simpler, trust. Trust beats search, hands down. How do we establish trust? By showing our true nature. How can we trust those who don’t trust themselves to be transparent? Why is Scoble so refreshing a wind across the Pacific Northwest? Because we sense we know him, warts and all, avid enthusiast, father, defender of the undefendable, remaker of the undefendable into something he (and therfore we) can trust. By balancing on this high wire, sometimes elegantly, other times clumsily, but always honestly, Robert sets a bar for the rest of us, including himself, a little higher each time he returns to the fundamental note.

Examine the Scoble model and I suggest he has created two channels of output: a traditional role as content creator, marketer, public. relations, evangelist, and a new powerful role, gesturer, which establishes and then lends authority to his other role. Some of his most powerful gestures–expressing his desire and respect for competitors such as Google and Apple–potentially could damage his traditional source of compensation. But in truth he is wrapping himself in the community of the user-in-charge, thereby indemnifying himself from most insults except the occasional bonehead move. Even then he establishes a wellspring of goodwill and trust that carries him over those oh-too-human foibles.

Examine the spread of the Attention Economy thread and you’ll find its potency increased virtually without identifiable support. Like RSS there was no authority figure behind it. No standards body, no bigco endorsement, no apparent connection between utility and monetization. Seth Goldstein and John Battelle aptly illustrate the academic and commercial history from Goldlhaber to Google’s database of intentions, yet nobody spent a nickel’s worth of time on it until, well, until I started being unable to see the world through anything other than attention-colored glasses.

The ugly truth of the 60’s we all refused to accept was that smoking pot did lead to the harder stuff–getting high and not smoking pot. Does anybody still think the reason the Beatles got famous was because Brian Epstein put them in suits? The technology revolution is about the power of the infinite, the capacity of each of us to imagine, and if we can imagine, then learn how to build it. The attention revolution is not about what we do, it’s about what we aspire to do. If I can get this much done today, how can I do more tomorrow? If this is true, then what else is true?

Finally, to gestures. If attention is true, then what now? If Office is dead, then what replaces it? The inforouter. How does that work? Poorly, at first. Poorly in the sense that the river of news is poor. Poor in the sense that when everyone can have an executive information system for the price of a connection, then how do we make paradise function more efficiently? Poor like the lowest paid millionaire at Google. Poor in the sense that every client is a rich client. Not poor, just uneducated.

How do we teach the inforouter? By inverting the pyramid. Ask not what the Net can do for you; ask what you can do for the Net. I gesture, therefore I am. Blogging is not a gesture. What the blog is about is. What the feeling of the post is. The humor, the benign neglect, the faux disrespect, so many inversions of the outgoing search model. Can you imagine the granularity of the gesture field? No more lowest common denominator required. Gesture directly to those who are listening to you. If you have money, that’s good. If you have predictive insight about those with money, that’s even better. If you have complete and utter affinity for something, that may turn out to be just as good or better.

The outgoing search model. Did you squirm at that one? A gesture. Not a fact, an assertion. Familiar too–Office is dead is another one. Still not convinced about Office. OK, explain why I’m wrong. Office is strong in the enterprise. OK, what percentage of time do you use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint? Outlook? The browser? For many, it goes like this:

• Email 40%
• Browser 30%
• Word, Excel, PowerPoint 30%

I’m being generous, but let’s say that’s the enterprise breakdown. Enter RSS:

• Email/IM 40%
• RSS/Browser 40%
• Word, Excel, PowerPoint 20%

This posits you staying with Outlook, replacing some PowerPoint work with a blog/RSS feed, and moving some document creation from Word to blog posts. Now the pressure begins, as RSS pushes some mainstream media (Times, Journal, tech news) toward linking of specific interest articles by thought leaders aka the blogosphere. Something has to give, and it’s called Outlook. Gmail enters the game:

• Email/IM/Skype 30%
• RSS/Browser 50%
• Word, Excel, PowerPoint 20%

Gmail absorbs some IM traffic due to its conversation threading, which also manages workflow in a rudimentary but more elastic way, particularly across multiple enterpises and virtual teams. RSS volume increases to breaking point, taking too much time for comprehensive results and forcing triage across multiple machines. This is where we are now. Attention services emerge to reduce RSS time to accomodate enterprise IT backlash.

Enter gestures:

• EVDO 20%
• Inforouter 60%
• Gesture production 20%

OK take a deep breath and relax. EVDO eliminates offline usage for all but airplanes, and Skype economics mitigate a percentage of that silo. Attention tuning will reduce RSS overload but not noise to signal, forcing seller’s market for gestures as gesture-aware routers and clouds take over RSS market. Here is where Google must rapidly integrate attention services across Desktop, Reader, Gmail, Gtalk, and GCal, and then bite the transparency bullet hard. In effect, the inforouter absorbs email, presence, and audio/video services, breaking the portal model by inverting search from user-triggered to information communication requests. Gesture interpolation and synthesis replaces virtually all Office document production as information publishers line up for permission to push content and track attention to validate gesture rankings.

I know this ends abruptly, but then so did the SuperBowl on that nifty wide receiver pass play. 

February 4th, 2006

Who do you trust?

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 5:41 pm

Categories: RSS

Tags:

RSS got another big boost today when portals-in-the-headlights AOL and Yahoo? decided they wanted to scrape some vig off of the email stream. Notice that this idea, first championed by Bill Gates several years ago in his famous "I will fix this problem in 2 years" speech, is in fact not coming from Redmond but two companies firmly in the grasp of carrier partnerships. But those who cast this as the enabling shot across the bow of Google and other broadband hitchhikers may not be right. My bet is that someone like Sun, with their Redmonk-promoted lead in identity services, could provide email certification for free in return for participation in the Sun server stack. Hmm, it is Google that Sun is partnering with, isn’t it. Goodbye AOL mail, just when they were getting a clue. Hello Gmail plus, still free. Microsoft, your bid.

Of course, RSS breaks spam, and Attention breaks glut, and Gestures break pre-paid authorized corporate spam. When I walk into Eats for breakfast, they hand me 4 quarters for the parking and the usual meal. They put the quarters on the bill, and the decaf in a to-go cup from minute one. Gesture-driven personalization. I don’t have a spam problem anymore. Most of my information comes to me on demand, and more and more sorted by gestures. Fixing something that’s not broken puts a big bullseye on the publisher. Remember: RSS readers are self-selecting, Attention readers mine affinity group data for targetted streams, and Gesture-sensitive publishers have a consentual relationship with their audience, aka partners.

Those who see this as a battle between them (MSM) and us (us-ers) may be consigning themselves to observer status, while those who harness the power of naturally forming affinity groups can act now to deincent those clouds and carriers who are taking silo stumbles. If Gabe Rivera is tuning Memeorandum more and more by content as differentiated from the easier-cloned linkrank, then he is moving toward the assent of gestures and away from the tyranny of transactions. What you bought is more a predictor of what you won’t buy than what you will, at least for some period of time. What your neighbor (in an affinity sense) bought, however, can have an immediate and opposite effect. Who do you trust?

My bet: those who shift the profit from the Spam Flag to the us-ers-in-charge.