Archive for: April, 2006
April 26th, 2006
Syndicate Gang hits street
Sorry about the delay on the new Gillmor Gang — it’s been playing on Sirius in 3 parts and I just finished mixing Part 1 for the Net. Parts II and III will follow shortly. I’m at Ad:Tech, where the marketing guys are being fed a pack of genetically altered "Facts" by email marketers about RSS. Of course the sessions on pre-Attention tech are packed so here they come, walkin’ down the street, etc.
Speaking of GestureBank, as I didn’t last night with Dan Rather (he got enough data from Dave), signups yesterday were at a record rate. Of course, the record is being set every day, but still…. And Dan, if you’re reading this, you gave us the wrong email address.
April 25th, 2006
Poolcast
Ideas are flowing in the GestureBank. I’m speaking on Friday at Yahoo at the invitation of Chad Dickerson, a former colleague at InfoWorld and now Platform Evangelist at the !plex. Chad sent me a reminder today asking for an idea of what I wanted to talk about, which prompted me to pull the covers further over my head and bury the Blackberry under several pillows and Macy the Cat. She purrs when it vibrates–it’s my new SoftAlarm setting.
Sometime later it occured to me that, as with many many things these days, the answer to the question was contained within the open pool of metadata and its guiding catchprase (stolen from the NY Lottery) You got to be in it to win it. Short story short: I want to talk about GestureBank, and since the conversation with Tom Maddox I linked to in the previous post went so well, I figured the best way to go was to answer questions from the get-go, with as little setup as possible.
I wondered whether the session was to be recorded, so I called Chad (strange double ring that sounded like European) and sure enough he was in London saying yes, it was recorded "for internal use." I ran the idea of releasing the recording to GestureBank contributors (the folks in the room by default qualify even if they haven’t yet registered) and Chad said that could be arranged. We’ll work the details out tomorrow.
In other GestureBank news, the beta is now public at www.gesturebank.com. You don’t need Gmail to register, although if you want to communicate with us directly, you should provide a Gmail address so we can enable GChat between you (you AT gmail.com) and us (gesturebank AT gmail.com). And I’ll be talking on two panels Thursday at 11:45 and then at lunch right after at Ad:Tech in SF if you want to chat in person.
April 23rd, 2006
Sneak Links
Here’s another cheap attempt at getting encouraging you to sign up with contribute to GestureBank: It’s the past 24 hours of the GB100 with path. At last look (yesterday afternoon) 80 of the 120 GB100 were gesturing in the Pool. Over the next few days we’re going to figure out how to open the beta up, but you can still send Gmail to gesturebank AT gmail.com to get in. I’ll be speaking at Ad:Tech on Thirsday (two seperate panels) and Yahoo on Friday (only Yahooers Chad?) so things will likely be jumping by then.
In the meantime, for those not in it, I’ll be posting a 2-part Gillmor Daily with Doc Searls about the Death of Links (Doc says no way, I say way) in a couple hours and Gillmor Gang soon thereafter.
April 21st, 2006
Sitting on a fence
Warning: The following is a blatant attempt to encourage you to contribute to the GestureBank.
I have been staring at the GestureBank 100 list for the last few minutes. Just waiting for something to jump out at me. (Note: you have to be a contributor to the GestureBank open metadata pool to try this at home.) Something just did–Opinity.com. I spent the afternoon with Tom Maddox of Opinity recording a conversation for his podcast, and then two more hours chewing it over some more. Tom was loaded for bear–determined to get to the bottom of Attention, Gestures, Office Deadness, and so on. I think he got most of what he was shooting for, though Office didn’t make the recording.
So I see Tom’s company site and decide to find the blog he produces, and then I see Feedburner’s feed to email tool. Now I’m subscribed in email of all things. Just wanted to see what the process was. This Web thing may have legs, I think. Thanks to Doc Searls’ pointers to Lee Abrams’ Dylan posts, I stumbled across the entire first chapter of the Dylan book, which is easily the best chapter I’ve read of any book I’ve read since Moby Dick. Seriously, it’s collosal, as Dylan says in an NPR audio stream I found buried in Doc’s linkosphere. These links are pretty nifty for a dead technology, Doc. Gotta hand it to you.
I explored GigaOm’s new Feedbunrer doodads today (somewhere on the GB100 page therefore.) One of them resized my Firefox tabbed console, which took several passes to restore because I saw myself being sucked into a Delicious competitor and didn’t complete the workflow. I presume that would have brought me back to my settings, but it pissed me off so I’ll never know. As a result I forget what the other one did, though it was less disruptive (in the old bad way we used to use the word) and I liked the fact that the Syndisphere is expanding. Net: be careful, no surprises please, certainly no extra IT work thank you.
It’s almost midnight and I still haven’t mixed the new Gillmor Gang, a special edition recorded Wednesday with Syndicate keynoters Jeff Jarvis, Richard Edelman, Amanda Congdon, Doc Searls, and Crunchboy, who will be in Spain instead but has apparently been booked for Syndicate Moon Orbit (actually SF in October.) The episode concludes with a nifty cliffhanger, so I better get it on the grid so that we can all hang together. If I can just tear myself away from the GB100…
Oh my, Hugh has just gone berzerk again. Yum.
April 20th, 2006
The GestureBank 100
is feeding the Pool as of 10:13 this morning. Please create your finest content to attract their gestures. If all goes well, we’ll be opening the beta real soon now. Now back to our movie The Rocketboom Tapes, starring Dave Winer and Amanda Congdon.
April 17th, 2006
Younger smarter brother
Bayosphere has a new home, and so does brother Dan’s blog. Subscribed. Now make it fulltext, please.
April 13th, 2006
Announcing the GBX
As we’re about to launch the GestureBank beta, we’re freezing development of the AttentionTrust Recorder by forking the code as is. Given the success of the ATX (the Recorder is formally known as the Attention Trust Extension to Firefox) in putting the teeth into the AttentionTrust principles, the GestureBank Recorder (GBX) will build upon that platform as it stands. Frankly, we are interested in heading off any possible monetization or market force strategies around the recorder such as separating users into two classes (i.e. individuals and corporations) or status groups (i.e. blacklists and whitelists.) As the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Accordingly, the GBX will perform identically to the current ATX, with some extensions to the extension for splitting the individual data into two streams, one poured into the GestureBank open anonymized pool of metadata, and the other a secure, encrypted gesture stream owned by the user. All existing attention services will continue to work as they do now with the ATX; the user can choose to use both alongside each other or the GBX version by itself. We will contribute all useful fixes and enhancements to the core ATX back to the Trust for its consideration. We hope the Trust will continue to do the same in return.
It is our hope that by freezing development of the ATX in this manner we will preserve the trust the community has placed in the Recorder while encouraging the Trust to work with other members of the community to extend the extension with new features that can be shared back to any participants who want to maintain a standards base. Since the GestureBank pool is only accessible to those who contribute to the pool, we need to establish a user-controlled version of the ATX that guarantees both the underlying principles of the Attention Trust as well as the guiding principle of GestureBank, namely that "you’ve got to be in it to win it."
As you will see when we move next into the public beta, GestureBank services will be available only to contributors. The first of those services will be the GestureBank site itself, where visitors will be redirected to a sign-up service to download the recorder and begin contributing data. The first private beta will serve mostly to streamline that system and establish some metrics around the original pool of contributors. This opt-in approach to both metadata contribution and service access will decrease sharply the time between the private and public betas. We are also readying an IE version of the ATX and GBX recorders to further accelerate adoption.
This post is in service of the AttentionTrust’s principle of transparency, building on the commitment thousands of users have already made to take ownership of their metadata. Now, with GestureBank and its open pool of metadata, we have the opportunity to take the next step toward creating value and ratifying the Trust’s other principles–property, mobility, and economy. See you at the Pool.
April 12th, 2006
Ask a silly question
Umair answers one of my questions (see update at bottom of original post for link to his response to me):
Guys, I don’t have time to do the justice to the huge Disney discussion going on at the moment (I’ve wasted too much time dealing with Steve Gillmor’s idiotic comments instead, sorry).
So let me clarify. I certainly don’t think Disney’s move is dumb.
But then this:
Final note for all the commenters who asked for an example of rebundling. Please guys - come on. Surely you can figure this out.
My point exactly.
April 11th, 2006
Surf's Up
Skimming thru the blogosphere tonight, I caught a Scott Rosenberg quote of a quote by Cory Doctorow to the effect that punning, obstruse headlines are bad news because they cut down on clicks i.e. page views. Forgetting for a moment that creative headlines work wonders in full text feeds, the types of audiences gathered by the page view model may be large but not qualified. A relationship audience has powerful characteristics that are reinforced by shorthand, nicknames, shared gestures, etc. Combine page view and gestures and you have the next wave. See you at the pool.
April 10th, 2006
The Attention Pool
I was going to call this post Morons in a Hurry in honor of the Fab Four trial quote by Apple Commuter’s attorney, where the phrase was employed as in "Only a moron in a hurry wouldn’t understand that iTunes wasn’t a record company." Then I was going to call it Scoble Jumps the Shark in honor of Robert’s clueless defense of Supernova’s braindead speaker strategy. But I then spent the weekend alternately debriefing and being debriefed of my anger with Mike (TechCrunch) Arrington, producing four Gillmor Daily’s worth (no, 5 counting a failed unleaded redo) of venting before finally taking Mike’s advice on show 3 to give Scoble a call and "just chat."
So now everything is hunky dory if a bit Second Life koolaidy (see last post for rare link) and so Robert has apparently escaped the Jaws of Death (not Office of course) and we are good. Thus tranquilized, I stepped out into the Blogosphere and got creamed by a couple of fast-moving mememeisters–Umair Haque and A Player to be Named Later. I met Umair for the first time online, the author of a powerful PowerPoint that rolled up the Attention Economy in 84 gazillion slides, making it indisputable for even public service radio producers (Stephen Hill) that Something was indeed Up with Attention.
I avoided reading the slide deck at the time, mostly because I was up to my ass in alligators trying to invent the Gesture model and didn’t want to be distracted by other ideas, even better ones. When I finally did look through the deck, I was pleased to see how rigorous his approach was, and how successful at capturing the disruptive nature of the transformation he and many others discern. Eager for more, I subscribed to his blog and waited.
The second time I met Umair was in person, in the super-secret high-powered Business 2.0 building in downtown San Francisco, where Om Malik pretends to do his day job. The occasion: a galactic convention of startups and a few late-invited hangers-on like me. Between the time I met Umair on- and off-line, he had developed an extension or overlay or something of his atttention work under the rubric of edge competency. Forgive me if I don’t get this quite right, because I admit I don’t have my arms, or even fingernails, around what he’s trying to say.
Certainly that’s OK with me. Not only have I been accused constantly of being confusing or downright misleading, but I completely agree. This blog is as much if not more therapy for me than the Therapy session I recorded with Scoble on Sunday. The only possible difference is that I am not trying to sell papers, reports, or other products based on this stream of opinions, stabs in the dark, guesses, and mere trouble-making. Some might argue that Gillmor Daily and Gillmor Gang are just such products, but since most people tar those shows with the same brush (including the other Gangsters), I guess you’ve already been warned.
So today I pick up the paper (no, there is no paper, it’s my InfoRouter) and here’s Umair telling us that Fred Wilson is wrong. More precisely, ABC is wrong in offering hit shows with ads for download:
You might think so - everyone in the industry is applauding Disney for having the courage to be so 2.0. Though Fred and Jeff are impressed, my take is different: I think Disney is making exactly the wrong move.
Certainly, unbundling TV from distribution is a good first step. It will provide a bit of a top line boost, etc. But it’s the wrong first step to sustainably create value at the edge. I outlined and predicted this months ago in my TV 2.0 research note.
I could past in the rest of Umair’s argument, with lots more edge words like bundling and unbundling and links to more reports (presumably for real edge money) but I won’t. Not because I think he’s wrong about this–it seems logical as far as it goes–but because he appears to be following ABC’s bad model himself: Littering his (potentially) terrific insights with ads for his ancillary products. The unfortunate result of this strategy (which Umair describes as akin to a nose job in ABC’s case) is to raise the question: What does Umair do for a living?
This is the same question, parenthetically, that I often ask about Jeremy Zawodney: What is his his day job? I know Scoble’s job. Perhaps Jeremy has told me or told us on his blog, or told us what it used to be, or what it has morphed into, or … But let me be clear: I think Umair, and Jeremy, are brilliant people who deserve and probably have great jobs, or will very soon. There’s a lot of money on the table in this Attention economy, and they are sure to get their share.
But if I understand Umair correctly, he should take his own advice and strip mine those commercials out of his content, or do what Redmonk does and just ride on the fact that there’s lots more where that came from, or contribute to the GestureBank so we can sell his Gesture stream for what it’s certainly going to be worth (a lot.) The other guy is John Hagel, who Umair points to in dithering about Doc Searls’ Intention Economy post. John makes the case that he and a co-author invented the idea of reverse markets 7 years ago, an idea that I never heard of until today but which sounds a lot like my argument that search is being inverted from users looking for information to information looking for users. Or gestures, which Doc suggests is similar to his idea of intention.
However, Hagel posits intelligent agents as the "infomediaries" of this inversion. But…
For a variety of reasons, the infomediary business model has not yet taken off, but I continue to believe there is a significant economic opportunity waiting to be captured by businesses that cross the table and explicitly take the side of the customer, rather than helping vendors to find or “capture” buyers.
I haven’t clicked on the variety of reasons link. Let’s see… what happenned in the last 7 years…. Oh, yes, RSS. But RSS puts that business in the hands of the users, not the vendors, if they want to grab at the opportunity. John, contribute to the GestureBank or some other truly open pool and your long national nightmare is over.
Me, I’m with Fred Wilson:
It means they get The Future of Media. They are freeing their content and monetizing it on the web. It looks like they are microchunking it, but it’s not totally clear. And I am not sure about the syndication part. But it doesn’t really matter. They get it, they are leading they way.
But it also means they are not deliberating, they are obliterating. They proved me wrong about big companies, at least one big company.
Remember: You’ve got to be in it to win it. Send email from Gmail to gesturebank AT gmail.com and contribute to the open pool. We’re not deliberating either.
Update: Umair responds
April 10th, 2006
Scoble and O'Grady
are the two latest Gillmor Daily’s, the one with Scoble recorded Sunday night and Redmonker Stephen O’Grady recorded today after the RedHat/JBoss deal announcement. ZDNet is switching over to a new CMS at 5:30 Pacific so I’m posting this now. Murphy…
April 5th, 2006
SPLASH
As of 4PM Pacific the GestureBank anonymized pool is scheduled to begin filling with metadata. News as it develops. Thanks to all the testers/contributors. If you still want to join, please send Gmail (must be from Gmail account) to gesturebank AT gmail.com. We will place you in a waiting list to replace any testers who are unable to participate, and you’ll be included in the second beta phase coming soon to a browser near you.
April 4th, 2006
What about open do they not understand?
Alex Barnett does:
Claria’s proposition is that it’ll track you everywhere - ‘myware’ but without the ‘my’. Can you edit the data it tracks? Can you export it? Can you expose it to another service and treat the data it collects as your data? Is it your data? Nope, nope, nope, nope and er, nope. Sounds great doesn’t it?! Install software that tracks your everyclick so marketers can spam you! Lovely! Sign me up!! Not.
This is where the Attention recorders come in (as Jon Galloway pointed out in the comments to my related post). This is where Steve is coming from. There are others thinking this way too. The questions I have are:
- which of the Attention recorders will play an open Attention data game?
- by open I mean - which attention recorders will allow the users’ data to be edited, viewed, shared, purged, exported and controlled - fully - by the user?
- and which of these recorders will act as a service that others services (or people) can connect to (or locked out) with the user’s permission?
- and…which developers of the newstrackers, aggregators, attention engines and raft of other services that would benefit in accessing that data with the user’s permission will be smart enough to see the opportunity here by allowing the third party, *trusted* recorder-provisioned, user-controlled attention data pools to plug in?
I’ve still not got the GestureBank invite. But from everything Steve has written about his idea it looks like its going to set the standard in the open myware / mydata / attention data / recorder / connector scene.
Alex — you are in the beta program. Once the last 3 2 testers in the initial beta are is confirmed (email gesturebank AT gmail.com from a gmail account) the pool will open its doors to the testers. Once we’ve got the software up and running, the fruits of the open pool of metadata will be shared, first with the initial group, and then, when we can handle it, anyone who wants to join. The price of admission: Contributing to the open pool of anonymized metadata. Alex gets it. Come on in, the water’s fine.
April 3rd, 2006
Attention War
An attention war is breaking out, says Kevin Burton. He notes Claria is entering the personalized home page race popularized by the memetracker/reading list discussion that’s been bubbling for the last few months. Burton cites Greg Linden’s Findory as an early entry in the "implicit tuning" space. The SearchSIG session at AOL last month touched on this arms race as well (there’s a podcast of the event somewhere.)
Kevin should be concerned about Claria’s deep well of attention metadata, but he misses the point when he attacks the notion of people being willing to install a product from a spyware company. All proprietary clouds of data obtained without the users’ permission are tainted, and it’s my bet (GestureBank) that given a choice between an open pool and any proprietary one, the open pool will implicitly be more trusted.
Speaking of which, we’re down to 7 4 open slots in the GB beta pool. If you want to contribute to the initial pool, send email from Gmail to gesturebank AT gmail.com.
April 1st, 2006
GestureBank Pool
We’re closing in on the number of GestureBank testers we can handle. A few have not yet responded to a GChat invitation, which likely means that they are not using Gmail on a regular basis. I’ll leave the slots open for those folks for another few days, and suggest that if you are willing to contribute to the open pool of anonymized aggregated metadata, you should send email from a gmail account to gesturebank AT gmail.com. We’ve got 22 21 14 11 9 7 slots available.
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