March 31st, 2006

Adam and Steve

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 10:13 pm

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Gillmor Daily with Adam Curry.

March 29th, 2006

Thanks for listing

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 8:54 pm

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More GestureBank signups in the past 24 hours than any other day in GB’s existence. Thanks to Dave Winer for posting a link to the Q&A. Thanks to Chris Pirillo for IMing me with the Lenovo video used in the post. Thanks to Doc Searls for understanding at such a deep level that I need to get rid of the stuff that’s pressing on. Thanks to Crittendon for being the first beta tester to respond positively to a request for something other than his or her contribution to an open pool of metadata. It never hurts to ask.

Thanks to Dan Farber for spending an hour arguing about Microsoft on today and tomorrow’s Gillmor Daily. Thanks to Mike Arrington for doing so last week. Thanks to David Sanborn for the clueful chat the other day. Thanks to Podshow, Earthlink, GoDaddy. Thanks to all the miserable trolls for contributing to the anonymized pile of aggregated noise. Thanks to Al Gore for inventing the Internet. Thanks to Eric Norlin for offering me a keynote at the Syndicate conference in NY May 16 and 17. Thanks to Chad Dickerson for inviting me to Yahoo next month.

Thanks to my wife for letting me take a 3 hour nap today. Thanks to Robert Scoble for not invitng me to his party or Mix ‘06. Thanks to Jeff Clavier for inviting me to SearchSIG. Thanks to Tom Foremski for going full text. Thanks to Gabe Rivera for being himself. Thanks to Jonathan Schwartz for having all those dinners with CIOs so I don’t have to. Thanks to Doug Kaye for being excited. Thanks to Richard Eckel for being in the right place at the right time. Thanks to George Bush for rescuing the Democratic Party. Thanks for listening.

March 28th, 2006

GestureBank Q 'n A

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 11:51 pm

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People ask me how GestureBank is going?

Great!

When will it ship?

As soon as it’s ready.

Why should we care?

Either because you care about how you spend your time or maybe you shouldn’t.

Are you looking for venture capital?

I have been until recently, but now I’ve decided I’d rather have a life.

Are gestures the monitization of attention?

Yes.

How do I get some of that?

Contribute to the open pool of anonymized metadata.

How do I do that?

Send email from a Gmail account to gesturebank AT gmail.com.

How many people have done that so far?

Sorry, you have to contribute to get access to the data.

Are people really asking you how GestureBank is going?

See previous answer, but no.

This concludes the GestureBank Q&A.

March 24th, 2006

The Allchin Tax Cut

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 4:17 pm

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Mike Arrington missed the Gillmor Gang taping today, even though he changed his travel arrangements to be there. I forgive him, because he’s understandably starry-eyed by his lunch with Bill Gates at the Mix06 conference. But I don’t forgive Robert Scoble for not inviting me, or Waggener Edstrom either.

Let me be clear what I am saying here so Scoble can cut directly to the chase: I’m thrilled that Bill got a chance to sit with Mike, one of the sharpest tacks in the blox and someone who is rapidly growing both in stature and experience with being played by the old guard. And I will always treasure the opportunity Frank Shaw at Wagg Ed gave me several years ago to sit with Bill and drill down for almost an hour–the only difference being that it was off the record.

But I was effectively running InfoWorld at the time, and Mike is running the hottest tech website, one that has done much to eviscerate InfoWorld’s current product review editorial direction. I certainly can see why Robert and Frank might prefer to go with Mike than put up with my Office is Dead schtick. Here’s the problem: Mike tells me (and you) that his impression was that Bill was kinda bored, or looked that way. Note: None of this is about the personalities here; it’s all about what’s going on at Microsoft and what impact it’s going to have Real Soon Now in our lives.

I’m going to peel back the onion a bit here because I think Robert needs a little reality check. A few weeks ago Jim Allchin was making the rounds in the first of these blogger briefings. Mike mentioned to me that he’d been invited to a San Francisco dinner and had passed on it due to a prior commitment. I called Robert up and basically said "Why the hell wasn’t I invited?" Of course I knew why: I’ve been very aggressive about Jim Allchin’s hammerlock on the Microsoft strategy, second only to Bill Gates in influence and clout, and have earned the enmity of Jim and lost the mainstream press clout with my "descension" into bloggerdom. Let’s just say that Robert’s attempt to correct the guest list was squashed by Wagg Ed.

Here’s why that was not a smart play, Robert. When I go on and on about Office being dead, and the Allchin Tax–which is about how Allchin protected Windows at all cost by killing IE functionality that undermined Office revenue–and then Allchin retires while still ducking a real conversation with someone about its implications for the ascention of some of those technologies (AJAX, Live, advertising-based free, etc.) that he taxed, well…..

Same thing here: When Mike reports Bill was bored, or that Bill doesn’t get the preoccupation with thin Office plays like Gmail, it’s not me who loses the opportunity to resonate with the audience, it’s Bill. The users are in charge, not Microsoft. Not Google. Not the carriers, although Kevin Martin may think so. We are, and we’ll vote with our packets. It’s a subscription model, not a prescription model. Scoble understands this, but in recent weeks he’s been making the mistake of cutting off the access of Bill and Jim and Steve to our gestures of intent. The customers/users/us will flow in the direction of a relationship, because as the expression goes, who wants to pay retail?

Now, Robert, I know you a long time, and you may not think I’m doing you much of a favor here by washing this linen in the clear, but you reap what you sew when you ignore your instincts. Stop calling for the head of a reporter or an editor or both about the 60% code story. Are you so sure that’s untrue? Or put it another way–are you so sure anyone except maybe Bill really knows how much code has to be rewritten, or thrown away, to meet a January deadline which most likely will also slip? If anything has become clearer over the last couple of days it is that Ray Ozzie has moved more precipitously than even I thought (Office dead, office dead, office dead) to rework Redmond around services.

Here’s my bet on the 60%–it’s the real Office Live code, the stuff that GOffice is stripmining, injected into Vista. It’s the real Windows bundle–Office hook line and sinker–free with the OS. Hell, they could even jack up the price 50% and no one would really complain. But Kevin Johnson and CAO Yusuf Mehdi will most likely subsidize it with ad revenue. How do you beat Netscape? Free the browser. How do you beat Google? Free Office.

But insulate these guys from the vanguard of the new messengers–from the hard questions, but the good ones–and you get bored Bill and boned Mike. I don’t care, I get paid more for being right, and Bill sure wouldn’t have been bored with me, or any of the Gang as well. As Mike Vizard said on today’s Gang recording, (my paraphrase) better Microsoft do it to themself before it’s done to them. Sell it the Republican way: it’s a tax cut–the Allchin Tax Cut.

March 23rd, 2006

Office Really Really Dead

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 12:05 pm

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Steve Sinofsky moves to Windows. Windows and MSN continue to get rolled up in Live. Ray Ozzie is quoted in Marketwatch bulletin:

"Steven’s leadership, management and technical skills are well documented and evident in the kinds of products he ships and the type of work environment he creates."

In his new role, Sinofsky — a longtime veteran of the Office business — will work closely with Ozzie and Blake Irving to support Microsoft’s services strategy across the division and company.

"I’m looking forward to working with Steven and his team in delivering software-based services that extend the value of our offerings by providing a more seamless connection between desktop products and the Web," Ozzie added.

 Translation: Steven ships on time. Office dead, rolled up in Windows. Windows now "software-based services." More seamless blah blah now under Windows group. Windows group under Ozzie. Office Dead. Now back to our movie: The Man Who Came to Lunch, starring  Mike Arrington.

 Bulletin: Boned by the Borg Part I released.

March 21st, 2006

Eager Beavers

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 11:42 pm

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Adam Curry is doing some video stuff that is waking up my video ipod. The bumpers alone are cool — or whatever the kids are saying today. It’s the strangest thing–this really is a Golden Age like the one I went out to Hollywood in 1970 to see, walking around on the MGM lot before they tore it down. Looking at the picture of Bill Gates and Mike Arrington, I thought: man does Bill look old and small. Scoble should be more careful who he invites to lunch; there’s a major league energy bypass underway.

This week I’m way behind on my reading but so what — first time I’ve felt happy being right where I am since 1973. Very few signals coming up to the cloud still, so as long as my Rojo buffer doesn’t overflow I’m good with letting things bubble up from overt gestures rather than down from attention maintenance. Attention deficit disorder is a non-issue. The Curry vidcasts understand this — it’s not about holding attention, it’s about respecting the connection with the subscriber.

New adds: Hugh, The Chronicle guy from CyberSalon, Snappytheclam, Lisa Stone. Man you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allen Poe.

Today I predicted Google will win the IM wars, coming from 1% share. David Yoffie said they had a long way to go, but didn’t rule it out. He also said the talk he gave was off the record, but I figure that was my bet he was responding to so it’s my record, not his. Cool — we’re back in the record business. 

March 20th, 2006

AttentionTrust and GestureBank

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 11:27 pm

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In the moment at SDForum SearchSIG the other night when Seth Goldstein announced the funding grant of the AttentionTrust by the Omidyar Network, a spontaneous burst of applause erupted. Months of discussions and diligence by Omidyar had resulted in a profoundly important ratification of the Trust’s mission and its principles, and the folks in the room recognized both the logic and the significance of  Omidyar’s support.

As cofounder with Seth of the Trust, I’ve been there from the earliest germ of the idea at Etech 2005, Seth’s first statement of the guiding four principles in an email, and the moment in the parking lot at a Kelsey conference as I drove away from a meeting with Seth and suddenly realized the Trust was the way forward to declaring our rights as metadata creators. I could have just turned around and driven the 500 feet back, but instead I called him on the cell phone. It was there that the Attention Recorder was born.

At the Web 2.0 conference last year we launched the first iteration of the Recorder extension during the first public board meeting of the Trust. In the discussion that followed, Tim O’Reilly suggested the possibility that the Trust’s opportunity could be similar to that presented by Richard Stallman’s positing of the beginnings of the open source movement. Could be, Tim cautioned. But in that moment, I began to think of the lessons learned by the advance of open software, standards, and services.

In that context, the Omidyar action can be seen as a bootstrap of one of the signal successes of Web 1.0 by an emergent Web 2.0 construct, Attention. If RSS is, as Bill Gates said today at Mix’06, "the start of the programmable Web" then Attention rights follow as the start of the user-in-charge. No wonder the SearchSIG audience, filled with VCs, mashup artists, and Attention startups, broke into applause.

When executive director Ed Batista messaged the Trust board with the good news about the Omidyar commitment, I felt just such a surge of delight, and not surprisingly, not a little pride in what Seth and I had started. But also a sense of responsibility to do whatever I could to justify the faith Omidyar has placed in our grassroots efforts. With the Trust on firm footing and the existence of the ATX recorder extension the "teeth" that underlines our rights to our own attention, what could I now do to close the virtuous circle of user empowerment?

Gestures. The third leg of the tripod, the other two instantiated by the Attention Trust and the Recorder. Why gestures? If the Trust asserts the right to control your metadata, the Recorder provides a reference implementation for each of us to insert ourselves at the beginning of the chain. But applications need an open stream of data to bootstrap the intentions of the users-in-charge on an aggregated basis. In turn, users need a way of influencing or guiding the services gleaned from the open pool to their individual needs and perspectives.

Seperating attention streams into two channels, one of anonymized aggregated metadata owned by its contributors, and one of gestures and private metadata owned by the gesturers, creates a powerful tool analagous to the fundamentals of free software and open standards. This is GestureBank, which I have been developing to stand atop the now secure foundation of the Attention Trust and its gifted open source Attention Recorder extension to Firefox. And the teeth: You can use GestureBank and its services only when you contribute to the open pool of data. And of course, join the AttentionTrust and uphold its four fundamental principles– Property, Mobility, Economy, and Transparency– just as Gesturebank does while building on top of the ATX Recorder and developer toolkit.

We’ve announced a private beta you can join by sending email from a Gmail account to gesturebank AT gmail.com. The Gmail requirement is to ensure that we can establish a live connection with each particpant via Gchat, which manages a persistent integrated store of IM and email communications. I’ve been working with Robert W. Anderson, a developer who I met at a blogger dinner in Berkeley (more specifically in the back parking lot during a vigorous debate with Robert Scoble about the fate of Microsoft Office,) who has been volunteering his ideas, advice, and nonexistent free time much to the dismay of his wife and children. The day after SearchSIG I drilled down with Dan Farber, Mike Arrington, and Dana Gardner, all of whom were at the event, on the just-released edition of the Gillmor Gang.

I have no idea if GestureBank will be successful at creating and maintaining an open pool of anonymized aggregate attention metadata, but given the Omidyar validation of the seminal AttentionTrust effort, I wouldn’t bet against it. In order to ensure that there is not only no conflict of interest, but not even the appearance of such conflict between the Trust and GestureBank, I tendered my resignation from the board and as President as soon as I heard from Ed Batista that the Trust’s immediate (and I hope and trust, long term) future is assured.

I have been careful not to talk too much about the GestureBank project as it began to develop, particularly as the buzz around attention began to mushroom and accelerate as RSS pushed many of us to the brink of information overload. With the AttentionTrust now endowed with enough resources to maintain a significant mediating role in the service of these essential first steps in users’ control of their metadata and digital identity, I am confident that GestureBank’s commitment to seeding an open pool of anonymized metadata under the control of its contributors will produce a further critical acceleration in the values and goals of the AttentionTrust.

March 20th, 2006

Something New

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 12:12 am

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I learned something tonight at Sylvia Paull’s CyberSalon, covered elsewhere by Scott Rosenberg. What I didn’t learn is anything useful about the endless debate about blogojournalism. Finding myself on a panel about this ancient and intensely simple "argument" is something I would only do for Sylvia, whose committment to reviving the ancient (20th Century) art of bringing thought to our Sopranos existence is both laudable and expertly served by her salting of the "audience" with remarkable minds in the process of finding their voice in the new network.

But my misgivings aside, I found myself stunned by the comments–and more, the body language, of several women, including Lisa Stone and particularly someone whose name I did not retain who will have to let us know more about her when she publishes an external blog. She spoke the KM-speak of a corporate tactician, and Lisa the data side of a partnership with Jory Desjardins’ color commentary. The something I learned was that however I can accomplish it, I need to factor this energy in to the moment we are experiencing in the birth of the network.

I’ve intuitively and insistently rebelled against this damn deadend of a discussion for years; at dinner I told Dave Winer in half jest that I wished everybody had some heart trouble early in life so we could avoid wasting some much precious time on this chattering of the minds. But sitting next to Lisa and watching the way the words about motherhood and daughters resonated in her throat and expression, somewhat like an athlete who has learned how to leverage focus to reach the appropriate velocity at the moment it’s needed, I saw something akin to a new car pool lane on 101.

Finally it’s arrived; the work is now underway and the frustration with the endless pingpong of the explanation of what has happened giving way to simple time management. Sylvia cut the filibustering of one panelist added at the last minute as his apparent request, expertly stage-managed a transition to women’s issues when the inevitable stalemate of the original elitist-no elitist setup turned rancid, and made no apologies for favoring female over male gasbags, myself included.

I enjoyed meeting the moderator, Andrew Keen several weeks ago before he strapped on his Bill O’Reilly pose, and amused myself watching John Markoff struggle through what he called afterwords "a trip to the dentist," and found the The Panelist Who Came to Dither a good mind terribly wasted. But thanks to Lisa and friends I found the event not strange as Scott reported but a telling signal that maybe just maybe the next time we have this conversation we can pick up where this one ended, in the streets at the intersection of What used to be and What might be.

March 16th, 2006

Ozzie and the Gang

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 12:20 pm

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Just posted the Gillmor Gang’s two-part conversation with Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s most civic-minded CTO, about his gifting of the Live Clipboard technology he announced at ETech. Jon Udell, Mike Arrington, Dan Farber, Dana Gardner and I drill down. Thanks to Ray and Richard Eckel for the time.

I’m on the way down to AOL Mountainview later today for SDForum Search SIG, where I will host a panel and demos about Attention and beyond. Dave Sifry, Seth Goldstein, and Gabe Rivera will sit Shiva on the Attention Economy, while Dick Costolo, snow-bound in Chicago, will be pinch hit for by the Arrington guy, who sure knows how to get attention. Be there and be square.

March 10th, 2006

The A Team

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 7:30 pm

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Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, a few words about the Attention Economy land grab this week (continuing thru next Wednesday at Esther’s conference.) Thanks to Esther for pointing out that Michael Goldhaber (Einstein of Attention) started talking about this in Release 1.0. in 1992. I was wondering where I got the idea from. Imagine my amazement when I found out that Goldhaber invented RSS in 1989, thereby setting the stage for today’s infoglut crisis and the reflowering of Attention 2.0. Nonetheless, success has a thousand fathers and mothers, as Fred Wilson points out, so I’m glad Goldhaber now has the impetus to lock in a book deal. Oh really? No, O’Reilly.

Other Attention winners:

• R0ml Lefkowitz, who wowed the Etech audience Fantastic Voyage-style with his tour of the sets for the Root Vaults database.
• Seth Goldstein, for landing in the NY Post in a story that curiously omitted use of the A-word.
• Doc Searls, for his brilliant encapsulation of the A-conomy as a subset of the Intention Economy, paving the way for the Inattention Economy
• Ray Ozzie, for his gracious and inspired gift to the Net of Live Clipboard and his appearance on the Gillmor Gang where he elegantly ducked the question of what that had to do with Attention.
• Me, for getting attention by not showing up. Thanks, Doc, Dan, and Phil Windley for the gestures.

Thus we come full circle to Gestures. At the heart of the GestureBank project is the notion of creating an anonymized aggregated pool of attention metadata. Without such a pool, freely available like Live Clipboard to the community, nothing will come of the Attention, Intention, or any other economy. That was the fundamental reason why Seth Goldstein and I founded the AttentionTrust and gifted the Attention Recorder to underline the Trust’s principles. It is also why Dave Sifry and I created attention.xml, to establish a stream of anonymized aggregated metadata. Of course, players have FUDed both efforts, the Trust by pretending to support the principles except for those that tend to undermine proprietary pools of metadata, and Axml by attacking the spec as proprietary or threatening revenue models.

That’s why, in spite of my desire to crawl in a hole and sit out this feeding frenzy, I’m excited about the GestureBank project. Beginning in a few hours or days, we will launch a private beta, hopefully providing enough data to populate the demo on Thursday night at SDForum Search SIG. If you are interested in participating, send me email at gesturebank AT gmail.com. The only requirements are a Gmail account (we’re using Gchat for communications due to its autoarchiving functions) and a willingness to contribute to the community. I’ll be looking forward to seeing your names light up in green on my GestureBank console. 

March 10th, 2006

Respect

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 3:07 pm

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Now that this is almost over–the Attention Economy milked within an inch of its life–we can get back to the business of living. The last few weeks have been like treading water: a series of repetitive dreams where the air is full of possibilities but somehow the getting from here to there is always just out of reach. Last night I was in some vast control room, where displays and video conferences vied for attention, but I could never quite hear well enough to choose which to join. Something about the earphone jacks on the wall.

Of course, I’m way behind on my reading. The river of news and blues is overflowing once again, reminding me why attention caught me up in the first place, this flailing in the face of time. What’s new, what’s the point, why do I care; each new packet analyzed for, as Doc so deeply put it, its authority and respect. I kid, because I respect. Even the bullshitters, because they are good at what they spew.

Let’s not kid ouselves. It’s not about attention that we’re all banging our cups against the bars. It’s not about memetracking; it’s the meme itself. It’s not about GOffice, or buying Writely, or Live Clipboard, or algorythms, or Nick Carr’s SnarkRank, or Jim Allchin, or Bob Sutor, or Fooofy or _____. It’s just respect. If you’re going to suck me dry of all my ideas, intentions, gestures, metadata, hints, jokes, peeves, pets, directions, intuitions, bad guesses, vengeful charades, spoiled bratrums, Earthlink testimonials, and dirty dish, at least give me the respect of handing me the vaseline before you ask me to bend over. Paying attention now?

Oh.

I feel better. Do you? Perhaps the trick is to develop a taste for how you feel just before you throw up. Here’s the meme: It’s not how you feel better when you finally throw up, it’s finding that place that convinces you to throw up because it’s "better out than in" as Ian McLagen once told me in the parking lot at Shangrila in Malibu. I had made the mistake of matching him drink for drink for too long and found myself staring up at the stars with my cheek pressed to the asphalt. At the time I thought it a cold remark; still do. But it was 25 years ago and I still remember it as though it was yesterday.

No, it may be cold, but at least he was giving me the respect of not giving a shit. It was there that I confirmed the feeling I got when my father died miserably of cancer, that nice guys finish first, that the ice ball we’re riding has respect for each and every one of us specks of dust, and that the chances are good that no one else will ever do justice to your ideas if you don’t do them for yourself. Cold comfort, but I’ll take it.

March 8th, 2006

GWhiz

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 9:42 pm

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Fun for the whole family. The new Gillmor Daily with Mike Arrington and Steve Gillmor, settling the musical question: Is Windows Live or Google Evil? Rated Gee for how much longer can this go.

March 7th, 2006

GestureBlank

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 11:50 pm

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Those who were expecting my session on Gestures at ETech tomorrow will have to wait until next Thursday’s SDForum Search SIG at AOL in The Valley, with Seth Goldstein, Gabe Rivera, Dick Costolo, and Dave Sifry. Meanwhile, Dan Farber fills us in on a Gillmor Daily from San Diego on the first full day with Ozzie, Goldstein, Stone, Hardt, Sifry, and their rendition of The Attention Economy.

Coming soon on Gillmor Daily: The World According to Marc — a two-part Canter with Coolio of the East… Bay.