May 27th, 2006

A Cure for the Summertime Blues

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 2:07 pm

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First Dave Winer highlights the one sentence in this blog that actually seemed to sound positive. You know, the angry old man, etc. Then a spate of crap from the trolls highlighted by one Paul Montgomery, a Down Under journalist (his word) who slimes all US journalists on his way to getting at me (not a journalist.)

So Dan Farber, Dana Gardner, and Doc Searls record the latest (still another one in the can from last week) Gillmor Gang and the Usual Strategy breaks down big time. Instead of some witty banter and Office is Deadness, the whole thing becomes my indictment of Tim O’Reilly/CMP’s Web 2.0 injunction and by extension Esther Dyson, Kevin Supernova, and the whole lousy business of tech conferences and the girls that don’t attend them.

The mood turns quite turgid. Farber points out that I’ve gone too far, actually making some enemies in the process. I lamely try and explain that it’s nothing personal, but of course it is and even Doc finally accuses me of trying to manipulate him into saying bad things. In retrospect, this might actually be a pretty good show.

But I don’t like the bad taste in my mouth and after the show I IM Doc to say I fear the Gang has hit the wall. I call Doc and he basically agrees, saying he thought the show might have been going downhill since Udell quit, and that Arrington and Calacanis seemed to be a breath of fresh air.

Of course, Doc and I are viewing this through the long end of a telescope formed by our latest experimental project, a two-part Gillmor Daily that has already partly aired on Sirius and will hit the Net later today or tomorrow. At the end of the session, Doc coins its name: Attention Deficit Theatre. For a 10 minute run in Part II Doc is absolutely relentlessly hilarious. Kinda makes it hard to focus on Gillmor Ganglia.

Interestingly, I think you’ll find that ADT resonates quite rightly with the Gangosphere, even this last deadly show. For me, having worked so hard with my compatriots to carve out a space where we can say what we really think without too much fear of the consequences, has allowed us to establish a contract with users that is all too rare in the current ClearChannelized media. Make no mistake: just because it’s a podcast done with Radio Shack gear and slipstreamed around day jobs in most cases doesn’t mean it has no economic clout or business model.

In fact, the Gillmor Gang is a floating offshore conference of its own, operating just outside the three-mile limit of paid vendor keynotes and nonconferences. What I liked about last year’s Gnomedex and this year’s Syndicate New York was that we were able to communicate without bending so far over to the entrenched business models of platform vendors or angel investors that our message was diluted beyond value.

But now we enter a cloudier period, the valley between Tony Perkins’ OnHollywood conference–where the dynamics of convergence were laid out like a CSI autopsy–and the "Web 2.0" conference at summer’s end–where John Battelle’s fierce vision of search appears to be on a collision course with the gathering storm of attention and gestures. Last year at "Web 2.0" saw the first public board meeting of the AttentionTrust and the launch of the Attention Recorder. This year: I may not even get a press pass.

To be clear, I was scheduled to speak at this year’s O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference on Gestures, the talk I ultimately gave at Syndicate. Rael Dornfest was persistent in offering a slot, and gracious if confused in accepting my pulling out with the excuse of not being ready. But behind the scenes, I was outraged by Daphne Kis’ refusal to extend a gratis invitation to Esther Dyson’s PC Forum that has been proferred as far as I know to every single person who has ever written an issue of Release 1.0, as I had done in launching the Attention bandwagon two years ago.

Given Esther’s insistence in attributing the dawn of attention to Michael Goldhaber’s earlier writing on the Attention Economy (not only at PC Forum but in the Wall Street Journal) and her mischaracterization of Doc Searl’s work on intention (prompted by my nonpresence at the shows) in the Journal, I came to the reluctant but firm conclusion that little has changed for those few people who have guided the evolution of disruptive technologies through the careful administration of resources (money) and influence (credit.)

The emergence of RSS and its spawn podcasting, OPML, and attention have disrupted the gatekeepers of disruption economics. Given the low barrier to entry of startup/mashup economics, VCs no longer have a lock on the early stages of the value chain, putting pressure on angels and incubators to make their clout felt early enough to get a meaningful handle on the tiller. The conference game, long the mechanism whereby the VCs were schooled not in the technology but the viral marketing mechansims of startups, has been disrupted by hybrid agents TechCruch, Om Malik, Fred Wilson, and the acquisition bunnies from the majors such as Zawodny and perhaps Niall Kennedy in his new Microsoft role.

Given this balkanization around the rubric Attention Economy, I felt it made more sense to bow out of both PC Forum (uninvited) and ETech, and focus on a session under my (our) control in this new ecosystem around attention/gestures. Meanwhile Omidyar committed to some funding for the AttentionTrust, freeing me to shift my attention to GestureBank. Accordingly, Jeff Clavier’s SearchSIG session at AOL became the opportunity for us (Seth Goldstein, Dave Sifry, Gabe Rivera, and Mike Arrington) to produce an unencumbered (and inclusive) conference of 1 on the aforementioned Attention Economy.

So how do we proceed through this Summer of Discontent? I know many of you are sick of my complaining about what is characterized by trolls as personal lack of attention. Certainly I am. But that’s no excuse for abandoning a platform that we’ve worked so hard to develop, one on which we can leverage one of the few open channels for trustworthy communication in this new ecosystem of disruptive economics.

So: in the spirit of the recent network upfronts, the "demise" of The West Wing but its replacement with WestWing/Friends Washington-with-Beautiful-People mashup, and various other interesting gestures yet to be hinted at, The Gillmor Gang is going on hiatus, to be replaced for the summer by The Gillmor Gang Presents: Attention Deficit Theatre, starring Doc Searls, Jason Calacanis, Dan Farber, and whoever else remembers the phone number and passcode or uses Gmail. Enjoy your vacation while you can.

May 24th, 2006

Reunions

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 6:41 pm

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I’m back in California after a week in New York and Boston. The Syndicate conference came off well from my perspective, with interesting keynotes from Jeff Jarvis and Doc Searls bracketing the two days of the show.  My keynote rocked of course, thanks to Marc Canter’s timely disruptions. I have a video of it that will be released to GestureBank contribuors in the next week or so.

My 40th high school reunion in Weston outside Boston was magical. Our chorus director Joe Schaaf, looking unchanged from 1966 at 80, led us in a round at dinner that melted away the years like so much silly putty. The sweet smile on his face at the end will linger in our hearts forever.

David Sanborn and I met on Sunday about a record he’s planning for the fall. Doc Searls and I are also discussing a project as well, and I’m talking with Dan Farber about the future of this blog. I’ve agreed to participate in the fall Syndicate in San Francisco. I continue not to be invited to speak at either Supernova or Web 2.0, both of which I spoke at last year.

Last week’s Gillmor Gang is up, with guest Jason Calacanis of his own mind fame. He’s so good I invited him to show up anytime, which he did on Friday’s show which will start rolling out Friday. I’ve gotten a fair amount of negative feedback about dividing the Gang up into 3 or 4 24 minute segments, but this allows me to run them both on the Net and Sirius. Besides, I like the way it feels in chunks. I agree that it’s too bad that Jon Udell has dropped out (hung with him in NY though), but the addition of Mike Arrington and now Jason (and maybe Sam Whitmore) is breathing new blood into this tired old reunion guy. So, unsubscribe if you like, but no apologies. I’m having the time of my life.

May 10th, 2006

Eric phone home

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 3:43 pm

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It says here on Dave Winer’s terrific new Share Your OPML service that Eric Norlin subscribes to InfoRouter. Eric, call me. 415-602-8170.

May 8th, 2006

Back in the USSR

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 3:12 pm

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Nick Carr is truly the gift that keeps on giving. His latest can-opener concerns the alleged Google strategy of converting all reading interfaces to search and keyword (i.e. tagging) interfaces. Nick’s genius (I think he is the leader in the post-dvorak world of meme-baiting) is to keep the bile churning in the throat by timing the release of the next dart at the moment the previous one begins its trip out of orbit into the Pacific Ocean near some irradiated atoll which proves too expensive to send a mopup crew to debunk.

On the latest Gillmor Gang recording Nick gracefully handles his failure to escape from the Blogosphere, dancing nimbly around the various inconsistencies in his rapidly-morphing overview of just what IT does or doesn’t now matter. To my untrained eye, Nick is undergoing a remarkable transformation. On the recording (I’m still mixing Part III of the previous show) he argues with that notion, seeing consistency in his view that IT doesn’t matter, utility computing does, and Web 2.0, well… Honestly Nick, it seems to me that Web 2.0 does matter in your Google enterprise view, even if you aren’t ready to capitulate to the meme.

As for links being dead, Nick demurs with an "I don’t really get what you’re trying to say Steve." Amanda Congdon does. Dave Winer does. What’s not to get? Links produce economic ripples that keep incumbents in charge; removing links puts users in charge. Clicking on a link does not pay the author; it pays the signaller (in this case the aggregator, publisher, or arbitrager of the link’s "value.") The author of the content is paid in link credits, which tether him or her to the tyranny of the mediocrity of broadcast economics.

Examining the GestureBank beta data reveals less in numbers, but more in micro-communities. On a daily view of the GestureBank 100, the data only starts to speak when you get into the 6 citation and lower range. Above that, the numbers speak to clouds, silos, and their relative opaqueness. Not that that’s bad data; it’s negative gesturing at its root level. GMail, doubleclick, Rojo, Bloglines, etc. It tells us what we already know: Users have agreed to the terms of service in return for what they see as privacy, tools, and ease of use.

Taken at face value, then, the link represents respect, whuffie transfer, and the dollar I give to the guy who opens the door to the cab when I’m at a conference. I bury the dollars in my expense report with a fictional cab ride to a fictional dinner (on a fictional expense account that disappeared at the beginning of this cab ride called the death of the print books several years ago.) The user contract with the link is indirect: I agree to follow or sniff that link for some possible exchange of value–more sugar for a vote of attention.

The publisher garners economic value from the vote, data to be sold to advertisers for use in extrapolating the relationship between that vote and sales of the advertised product. The user gets "free" stuff, soft goods (information) and/or hard goods (discounts, coupons, services.) But follow the money in the dollar tip and you start to get pissed off. First of all the guy opening the door is taxed on the assumed rollup value of the dollars. Why is the line "Don’t forget to tip your waitress" so common in comedy clubs? Because it’s the comic’s way of saying "Don’t forget how this thing works. It’s not the salary that counts–it’s the tips." The comic is also your waitress, serving you jokes (links) to get you to tip him or her enough to survive long enough for Johnny to call one of them over to the couch.

That’s the problem with links: We’re all waitresses on this gig. We’re waiting on the Big Day when we hit the Big Show, when Mike Arrington or Doc Searls or Dave Winer bestows the Big Link on us that gets us another 10,000 in ValleyWag bucks. Some of my best friends are linkers. Don’t forget to tip your linkers. Don’t want to link? What, and give up show business?

So I’m asking the question. Are links worth it? If the rich get richer, do the linkers get poorer? I get two kinds of attacks about not linking. One is elitism, the arrogance of the immigrant who gets in and locks the door behind him. You made it, why not me? I feel your pain. But what makes you think I made it, only to be yoked to the tip-machine with no opportunity to grow up sometime and be a publisher. The other rap is that I love links, it’s the Web way, it’s Kumbaya my lord, kumbaya. What are you smoking? IDIOT! Etc. I feel your pain too. Secretly I agree with you. But the evidence doesn’t support the notion that links are the end of the story.

I don’t get paid for page views on ZDNet. All my fellow bloggers do. As a result I don’t get paid very much, at least not in cash. But I do get paid very well in respect, because somehow people who(m) I respect seem to read what I write, and listen to what I say on the Gillmor Gang and Gillmor Daily. It may not be worth a lot in this page view world, but it’s worth more and more in the next one. In the world of Gestures, links retain their ability to point, direct, suggest, and all the other good stuff that they embody to those who love them so. But they are joined by other gestures that increasingly return greater dividends on their investment. That’s what the petrie dish known as GestureBank is all about, I hope.

Browsing the GestureBank, I see hints of gestures, the fairy dust that Seth Goldstein showers the invisble with to reveal its outline. Work backwards, I repeat as a mantra. Start with the end result of the link economy and track back. Take any link, medium popular. 6 links in the GB100 in a 24 hour period. How did each member of that affinity group get there? Here’s one:

www.flickr.com//photos/tags/onhollywood/

I went there at one point, from a post by someone who pointed at a photo Eric Rice took of Dan Farber and me at OnHollywood. But who are the others contributing that link? I (and they) could find out about what those others were doing before and after, but not who they specifically are. Unless they were told so, which I have just done with the above gesture. Indeed, the reason I was in that picture is because I intuited that Tony Perkins would put together an interesting conference not so much because of PageRank as GestureRank, and convinced people I respect, including Dan Farber and Kris Jacob of Podshow and myself, that it was worth flying down there. All sorts of gestures and actions fall out of such decisions; few of them are tracked based on link dynamics.

Here is the domain of the trigger puller, the decision maker, the user in charge. When Jonathan Schwartz talks about the difficulty of analyzing what Sun makes off of Java, or free open Solaris, or thought partnership, or any of the myriad links in his world view, he’s describing the dilemma of the page view model. Do you really make a decision to buy Sun based on a link, or even a series of links, or the data used to support the viability of a link cluster as being indicative of authority? Look at the business models of the link farms and evaluate the quality of the information captured.

If it’s a silo recorder on a portal site, they know which pages are retrieved when, which are most popular, which are most viral (based on where they came from and go to), and type of client, leads generated, and other actionable data. Of course, they don’t know what is uninteresting to the user, the road not taken, the mirrored data in other silos, the reasons why other silos are chosen. In short, the famous other half of the advertising that doesn’t work.

Now let’s take Nick Carr’s central thesis in his 3 year old post Does IT Matter, which led to the Book and now the Blog that’s eating the next Book, so far. Namely, that technology has become commoditized, nullifying strategic advantage. Here in a nutshell is Microsoft’s problem: How do they create strategic differentiation in advertising by cloning Google? Answer: they don’t. Cloning Google means cloning PageRank which means cloning AdSense which means cloning link dynamics. Ooops. Links are gamed, commoditized, disrespectful of underlying decision-making mechanics, user-debasing, and they suck more than gestures.

Just one of those dealbreakers is enough to stop linking. I still link on occasion, when it’s the most efficient thing to do. But user-debasing is a double-edged sword that impacts as much on me as it does you or us on them. As Amanda understood on Syndicate Gang, it’s insulting to the user to restate the obvious, or in my terms, to fail to anticipate the value of your gesture. If a link has already been sent by seventy-five percent of your affinity group, then at best your link to the same page is going to be acted on by one or at the most two clicks by your target user. And that second one is either a mistake or click fraud.

Insulting? Wasting our precious time. But not the publisher’s time. What happens when the user becomes the publisher? When the user gets to see behind the one-way mirror? That’s the power of the open Pool. The opportunity to unpack the gestures that support micro-communities, real economic power. The kind of power publishers work so hard to protect. And as Seth Goldstein points out, coops are powerful; they work.

We already know the power of links. What more can we get out of gestures. For starters, who the linkers are. Not their names, or their income, but their reactions, actions, and inactions. Remember that the greatest yield in time management is the culling of the less interesting. Looked at from a gesture perspective, each affinity link represents a dynamic ecosytem composed of a collaborative group with gestures rippling out and intersecting with other like or unlike-minded affinity systems. Where those emanations are more pronounced and back-referencing, powerful waves are generated. The Beatles are probably the most profound example of such a foldback affinity wave in our lifetimes.

And underlying it all, the power of the knowledge that we are tapping into the best of ourselves, the feeling that we can make a difference. 

May 3rd, 2006

Letting 'them' eat cake

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 2:26 pm

Categories: OnHollywood, RSS

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Thank God for Steve Jobs or the Cartel would be so totally unafraid of the midgets in the Valley (+ Redmond) about the future of music. In this afternoon’s panel, the Napster rep told us that ownership will go away. In the next breath she talked about letting users snip an HTML clip of a song. The whole panel, led by D’s Kara Swisher, beat up on Apple for not showing up. Me, I thought it totaly appropriate given the chimp mentality at work among the rent-a-track hypesters.

Why don’t they get that the iPod broke the back of the record monopoly, just like the VCR broke the back of the projectionist’s union. Michael Robertson: Jobs has to open up the APIs. Not really. Then the Apple trivialization. It’s about design, it’s the hardware, it’s oh so clueless. It’s about the model, folks. Jobs has combined all those tools with a landgrab barrier to entry to move the market inexorably toward the timeout on music catalogue back rights.

On the way down on SouthWest I watched shows on my Video iPod–Rocketboom. No DRM, switched over to Hendrix ripped from the CD. I only had 30 minutes between device clearance and device shutdown. iTunes and AirTunes are my system at home. Save losslessly. Renterz: good night and good luck.

Oh and Pandora still bites, whether it’s MusicIP or whatever. Lessee, what sounds like the Beatles. Bbbzzzzzt. Game over.

May 3rd, 2006

The Emperor's New Clothes

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 1:10 pm

Categories: OnHollywood, RSS

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The OnHollywood lunch panel kicked into low gear when Jonathan Taplin raised the spectre of network neutrality. Hollywood wants carrier lock so bad it can taste it. Why are we supposed to fear the carriers? Taplin continues with the notion that 5 companies controlling the world is insane. Why did Microsoft gain monopoly status? Because the world is insane. Guess so; I remember wiith fondness when Office destroyed WordPerfect and AmiPro, and when Java tipped us back from the VB ledge. And when Google… insane? I think it’s human nature at work, voting with their feet and clicks.

Even Taplin, who is obviously clueful in the extreme historically, still thinks the DRM permission slip will seed the winners in this RSS revolution. Wrong. The carriers will win only as long as there is no WiFi choice. Once WiFi zones become robust enough, people will use them like gas stations to load up on DRMLite bits, moving back into the EVDO controlled space for navigating between zones.

Photo: Dan Farber 

What level of ownership should the user have with the content, the moderator asks. Hooray for Hollywood–here’s the tunnelvision I expected and only caught glimpses ’til now. Let’s ask the Gorilla what he wants for lunch. Do you require full ownership of this mid-level marketing weasel or are you just gonna go for the ribs and wash him down with Yoo Hoo?

So why demonize the carriers? If Microsoft was allegedly so interested in net neutrality, then why the pathetic lobbying effort in Washington? They had no problem buying the Bush administration after Clinton’s meddling. Taplin says if Washington doesn’t stop the four carriers, the game is over. What game? What does Hollywood sell? Bits? No. Access. What is their ownership of access to emerging stars. Limited. Who are the emerging stars. Who owns Mike Arrington? Who owns the Gesture cloud. The users. The studios will have to come to Mohammed on this one.

Net neutrality is a shell game. It acknowledges the incumbents’ power at the moment when it is exposed as the empty threat it has become. Taplin: If we let open source infrastructure exist? Do we allow what South Korea allows? Ask the Gorilla what’s for lunch, Jonathan. Allow who?

May 3rd, 2006

True or False

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 10:57 am

Categories: OnHollywood, RSS

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Jeremy Allaire: Producing high quality content costs lots of money.

False. Talent.

Podzinger: The $76B Disruption. Audio and video search will be the new organizing mechanism.

False. Search is dead. The amount of viewing/listening time is finite. It’s not about finding stuff; it’s about throwing stuff away.

Blinkx: Pico takes the current context and creates a group of channels around that content. Blinkx.tv gives you the same passive experience of TV plus the ability to get to new interesting content.

False: It takes the current page and distributes the Memeorandum effect on top of it. Push search does not equal time conservation. It’s not about pushing stuff; it’s about throwing stuff away.

dbfarber: Blinkx is a first step…associating content channel with the context derived from a page. A second step is using the Memorandum, Gesture Bank technology and input to reduce the noise.

False: The noise is the problem. Creating noise only to throw it away is counter-productive and is rejected by the RSS generation.

All: We have a business model.

False. No model can compete against a user-controlled pool of open metadata. 

Navio: There’s a whole host of things you can do.

False. Everything is greyed out. It’s a micropayments DRM slicer/dicer. Poof.

Arrington: What kind of transaction velocity will we really have? Answer: Not enough anytime soon.

True. Micropayments suck.

Susan Casey: VideoEgg rocks.

True.

May 3rd, 2006

Wooden ships

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 9:30 am

Categories: OnHollywood, RSS

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Not a coed dancing in front of a camera.

Feels much more user-generated

Advertising is short form

Let them play with the content

Too much loss of control

Permission-based relationship with users

Willy nilly access to large amounts of content

Syndication is going to die

All those old windows will collapse

Lacking a good mechanism to get casual viewership

Own the wrapper not just the distribution of the file

They want to know at the director level

We haven’t opened up advertising revenue for small producers yet

Why are you the most conflicted man in the music industry?

The issue is only when the rights owner won’t let go

Context is the key to discovery

Passive discovery of new music–that’s when it starts to get exciting.

Short films have never made money ever basically

Not sure if we want 100,000 unsigned bands

Want a slider entertain me to enlighten me

The PC is the ultimate discovery mechanism

It’s all going to end up on the TV

No one will pay for commodity news, too nichey, brought to its knees.

Playlist module

There’s a generation of which no file is unwilling to be exposed

To help you click based on trusted sources

May 3rd, 2006

The Glass Onion

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 8:28 am

Categories: OnHollywood, RSS

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Now we’re starting to get somewhere. Almost from the moment Peter Hirshberg’s show ended, On Hollywood got down to the business of identifying what exactly is going on now that we’re entering the Post-Link world. You can get an argument about that thesis in any of your favorite blogs and conference hallways, but soon we will see fatigue setting in as media types realize the page view rat race is falling apart.

Sony would have us believe that content will reign supreme, not just in semi-real time, but as a legacy stream (Dr. Zhivago, Don Larsen’s perfect game, etc.) Fox would have us believe that 24 will move from one outlet to federated release, regaining the massive audiences collapsed by cable and offering challenges only in wrapping the micro-community payments in a a revenue model that will float blockbuster budgets. And Microsoft sees joy wherever they venture, ignoring the road littered ahead with silo and lock-in fettered vestiges of the Golden Age of Windows.

But look at what happened with The West Wing. Last week’s episode was the height of Hollywood magic, because it’s over. If it had somehow been rescued, Arnie Vinick would have won, eliminating the achingly sweet moment when he and Santos found the lurking Leo at the cusp of our one-party system. The Hollywood system is ill-suited for the coming storm, not because the talent isn’t here–of course it is — but because the silo model is like the airline industry. Frequent flier programs have doomed the carriers (pun intended) and a slowly emerging open shared pool will inevitably take down the current infrastructure.

On the Silicon Valley side, the same myopia is in place. Startups jockey for a seat at the blockbuster table. Incumbents pretend to listen to each other but can’t see beyond today’s Journal headline about Microsoft spending the $2 billion on buying Yahoo. Inside Yahoo, Jeremy Zawodny pokes for weakness in a user-controlled model. Outside the kring, Kevin Burton comes up with the same exact concern about users somehow gaming the system by taking over the Pool for evil intent. Good luck guys; talk about swimming against the tide.

Meanwhile the GestureBank 100 continues to grow–the finest collection of thieves, spies, whores, and grifters I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. Whatever Hollywood throws up against them in the next two days, the Cartel will be hard pressed to match them in insight, hunger, and disinterest. Remember, it’s not what you’re paying attention to that really counts, it’s what they’re ignoring that adds up. As John Lennon said, See how the other half live.

May 2nd, 2006

Hollywood High

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 7:05 pm

Categories: OnHollywood, RSS

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Roosevelt Hotel, Hollywood I ran into Ron and Marta Bloom at the opening reception at On Hollywood. Ron’s the CEO of Podshow, the company that I produce Gillmor Gang and Gillmor Daily with, as well as some business development. My badge read Steve Gillmor’s InfoRouter with the designation of Blogger. Ron told me to change it to Podshow. I did that. Note: Podshow is covering my hotel here, ZDNet my airfare, and Tony Perkins my press pass. Thanks to all.

The cocktail party was ValleyLite: John Furrier trying to figure out how to spend his 5 million, Eric Rice showing a video of him getting out of a ticket (80 in a 60 zone), and Tony Perkins’ wife with a baby wrapped to her chest. Dan Farber has the pix.

Tony Perkins took the stage to set the scene. I have been wondering why I felt drawn to this particular conference in this particular city. I lived here on and off for 6 of 10 years in the ’70s and early ’80s, and for the life of me never thought much about coming back. But Tony has a odd sense of timing that seems to presage important shifts in the tech ecosystem. As an example, Tony is showing a slide that shows an upward curve (A great time to be an Entrepreneur) that he cheerfully admits has absolutely no data to back it up.

Web 2.0’s Toastmaster General Peter Hirschberg does his usual excellent job of making us feel like we’re trapped in a Reefer Madness episode. Now a snip from his classic What am the Internets bit, and then RatherGate. OK we’re clear of the izblogingjournalism black hole. But wait, we’re in the Battle of the Brands segment. Toilet walls strike back. Fine. The bloggers have power. I’m looking around to see if Mike Ovitz is running scared yet.

Now we have the fundamental propaganda: The Link. The Tag. The Erotitaxonomy. No mention of the Death of Search or Links, or Attention. Peter is oh so retro, but I guess it’s all for the Cartel’s remedial benefit. Don’t worry, here’s your Long Tail right here pal. Nice technorati commercial about relevance — "a lot more like the world of magazines instead of posts just coming at you." Shades of Sphere… Is it live yet? Did it go beta? Mike Arrington, sitting in front of me,  skypes: Kill… me…

I don’t mean to be hard on Peter. He’s just an easy target. The audience is loving it; Disco Jesus is tearing up the room. I will survive… Bus. It’s YouTube Live.

May 2nd, 2006

Play it again Sam

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 9:34 am

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A few weeks ago I was pinged by Sam Williams, who was writing a story on Attention for Technology Review. We had a nice chat, I asked him to let me know when it was published, and I forgot about it. Then the story came out and I once again remembered what a privilege it is to have a platform under my (more or less) control. Thanks Dan Farber. Thanks Podshow.

Now Seth Goldstein has published the "Director’s Cut" and I can see again why I thought the article would turn out good, or well, or whatever. Thanks, Sam, Seth, and you for reading it. Now back to our movie, Off To Hollywood, with Dan Farber and a caste of thousands.