Steve Gillmor’s InfoRouter | Archive for June, 2006

Archive for: June, 2006

June 30th, 2006

The Attention Operating System

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 3:50 pm

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Transitions:

Procedural
Declarative/attributes
Connectedness

Bag of drivers
Abstracted layer above
RSS — lightweight instantiation of Web Services

Attention the meta layer above information routing
Net threading of bit processing
Gestures signalling layer of info net
Same way that WTS pushes only change bits and XAML drives API for UI gestures, mine what is not done or stopped as high value return

Contract initiated by users, not publishers
Gestributors as metapublisher rolls up content as a gesture among many
In it to win it: Gestribution uber OS
Contribute and authenticate to Gestribution network.

Affinity formation creates application base
Open pool creates attention currency
Gesture streams create invitations for contract
Pool validates GestureRank
AOS authenticates via pool contract
Apps validate via affinity contracts
Licensing reflects valuation of contract and GestureRank of participants

Data portability guarantees choice and pricing pressure
Pool data can be combined with gestural data to favor user control
Establish microcommunities with provable buying power
Analogy to OS cycle allocation validated by microcommunity metadata: interrupts and resource allocation prioritized at GestureRank layer based on contract evaluation
Content flows or doesn’t flow based on gesture/contract dynamic aka gesturecred

*****************************

The Attention Operating System

Requirements:

Attention principles ( at.org)

Attention kernel (atx)

Attention framework (attentionsoft)

Attention applications

Root.net
– behavioral recording
– social expression (gb certified)
– influence metering

GestureBank
–Open anonymized pool
–WYSIWYContribute

June 25th, 2006

A Hamburger Today

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 12:19 am

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Now that BloggerCon is over, I’m going to start releasing some of the backlog of Attention Deficit Theatre and Gillmor Gangs that have built up. Those who, like me, stayed in bed this morning and listened to the ConCast were treated to a remarkable string of interesting stuff, none of which would I want to compete with for your attention but rather support by suggesting you listen to the podcast versions available on the BloggerCon site. Mike Arrington’s Core Values was great to see in person, and Dan Farber’s classic photographs elsewhere on this site convey much of the additional metadata.

I’m also starting tomorrow, between compiles and mixdowns, to put together materials for my Gnomedex session on Friday afternoon. Normally I would wait until the last moment and then wing it, but I hope to have several important things to announce and convey, and at a minimum want to create an outline from which to work. The problem with an outline, however, is that it means booting up Word. Or PowerPoint. I could cheat and use Keynote, but Doc, who’s a master of this presentation thing, would again reiterate that PowerPoint rules. But the real reason I don’t want to use either is that I always get the nagging impression from a PowerPoint that I’m getting pitched. The experts at this: R0ml, Doc, Dick Hardt, are so obviously credible that they survive that subtle problem handily. But I am not in their league, and would rather come up with a different plan than start off a lap back.

Arrington’s BloggerCon session was similarly placed to where mine will be on Friday, coming at the end of a long day but before the host’s last word. His was essentially a therapy session, with him as the therapee and the room as therapist. His problem: Life at the top sucks. As I jokingly said to him before the session, I had to get out of bed and come down for this, because to my knowledge this was the first time I’d heard of a trainwreck preannounced for 4:30. And it outperformed the hype, with Mike posing questions and then relentlessly interrupting the answers with corrections or more questions. He doesn’t call it TalkCrunch for nothing.

My problem is different: I’m not Mike Arrington. I can’t get away with being totally wrong just through the force of my personality. Besides, I’m not wrong. I wasn’t wrong when I said Notes was dead (August, 2002) or Office (November, 2005) or links (sorry, look it up). Now, just because Mike isn’t really totally wrong all the time doesn’t mean I am wrong any of the time. Lucky for me that Doc hasn’t put together a slide deck about my link prognosis. Even without it, according to Arrington, nobody thinks I’m right about that. Nobody.

This is where Jason Calacanis comes in. Now here’s a guy who, just because he got $25 million for Weblogs, Inc., doesn’t necessarily know what he’s talking about any more than he did before that. But I’m sitting at a table at some event and suddenly he’s there literally begging to be on the Gillmor Gang. And the next thing I know he’s telling us that when everybody says you don’t know what you’re talking about, that’s where the big opportunity is.

OK, so about links: here’s an idea I had a few days ago lying around chasing dreams. So links are dead. It’s 2 years later, I’m in the inforouter and I see a citation, say, "links are dead." No link. I hover over the words, right in the middle over "are". The service (2 years later, software is dead, only services) grabs my recent gestures, factors in my affinity stream, and gives me what is essentially a gesture-check squiggly line, a dynamic link. Now quick, hurry up and go trademark this idea, because remember that this is two years from now and I just gave you the idea for nothing. Think about it. How hard would it be to implement this? Not hard.

Think of it: no more clicking on links to posts you’ve already read. No more missing posts that live ten minutes down the list past the time you have to read before you go to the meeting. You get the idea. But only if you act now. Two years from now–too late. Office 2007? Naah. Office Live 2007? Maybe. Tethered to a gated attention pool? That’s the billion dollar question. One that Ray Ozzie and Sergey Brin and Steve Jobs will have to answer in the next few months. Not years.

Hopefully I’ve given you something to think about in the days leading up to Friday. ~~Many~~ Most will ignore this. Nick Carr may call it naive. Valleywag won’t care. Dave Winer won’t point. Mike Arrington will get richer. And each day we’ll be one day closer. See you in Seattle.

June 24th, 2006

Once I realized I had something, I forced myself to relax, hoping not to break the spell. It wasn’t easy, since I was excited by the discovery. Yet I knew that some ideas that seem profound in the perfect world of dreams fall apart in the sunlight. I compromised, letting myself go back under one or two more times, playing with the ideas and watching where the sidetracks took them, and finally brought myself up when I began to feel I’d filled the container too full to recall. Immediately I sat up and, not finding a pen, sent myself a quick note on the Blackberry. While I didn’t get it all, I got enough to represent the feeling. Then I went back to sleep.

Waking about an hour later, I noticed the red light blinking on my Blackberry. Figuring that it was just my email to myself I lay in bed for a while trying to see if I could remember what I’d come up with without looking at the note. As I suspected, it had largely vanished. Finally I looked, only to discover the signal was actually two emails, one from Frank Shaw of Waggener Edstrom, and the other from Ray Ozzie’s communications director Richard Eckel. Luckily I had just enough time to dial into the press conference where Bill Gates announced his plan to downsize Microsoft and supersize his and his wife’s Foundation. Frank and Richard were responding to my column of 12 days earlier suggesting much of what was now transpiring.

Watching Gates and Ballmer grapple with their and Microsoft’s mortality was compelling watching, and more so when Frank sent me a link to a Channel 9 video where Bill looked somewhat more emotional and even regretful. Much is now being made of the doubt that Bill is really letting go, but my sense is that Bill will always act according to his best guess of what it will take to accomplish his goals, and his goals clearly have widened beyond the Microsoft silo.

Certainly I was proud to have anticipated this event, and I hope to take advantage of it in marshalling the momentum of the Gillmor Gang in related areas such as conferences and other technology businesses. As Dana Gardner has noted several times on the show, we have been remarkably ahead of the common wisdom in understanding the profound shifts that are taking place, in no small measure due not just to the individual strengths of the group and its contributors but the interaction and crucible that the Gang generates and feeds off of. And underpinning it all, the living breathing network of attention and gestures.

I don’t pretend to think that my Memo to Bill precipitated his decision last week, but regardless of its impact it was meant as a gesture of support for doing the right thing. And in perhaps an even more strategic way, for Ray Ozzie to do the right thing. To be blunt, the first thing Ray needs to do is seize control of the company alongside Steve Ballmer, not as a greater of equals with Craig Mundie. Mundie should be positioned as an heir to Ballmer, if that is what is intended. But for Ray to step up to the challenge and opportunity that is Microsoft, he needs what he already effectively has, a backbone of steel that rivals Bill’s. Say what you will about Bill’s aggressive take-no-prisoners visage, he was the right man at the right time for the job. He wouldn’t have worked his way out of this job if he weren’t the ultimate tough customer. I’m counting on that in his new job. We all should.

Ray’s steel is of a different caliber: He has a graceful kindness that we all can feel, and a cautious streak that has served him well in the Gerstner years and to some extent at Groove. But when he sees an opening for something that will advance his vision, he acts, regardless and in fact because of the obstacles he faces in getting there. When he saw the need for harnessing XML as the data store for the network architecture, he and his Groove cofounders reluctantly but persistently rolled their own. Not knowing the details of the Groove/Office integration plans, I would bet that that infrastructure is now largely abandoned, replaced by the WinFX fundamentals Ray praised so highly when Longhorn first surfaced and had not a little impact in guiding with his Groove precepts.

In effect then, Ray has already been operating as Chief Software Architect for a number of years, working by influence and under cover of a startup, albeit a startup with the patron of all patrons. In that context, the transition is largely now one of ratification of an already existing relationship. The Live efforts and their correspondingly greater visibility in the horse race mentality of the tech media community notwithstanding, the real consolidation is all about the rich client/server architecture, or as Ray puts it, the client/server/services architecture. Potentially, there is the same kind of synergy and monopoly power (in the good sense of that word if you’ll allow me–you know like good disruptive works) in this intersection that famously occured first with Visual Basic.

But note that I add the word "rich" to client/server/services for a political reason, annd that is that rich is a code word for Microsoft hegemony, used by the guy who I labelled a pinhead on Pinhead Gang. To reiterate, the notion that users want rich is like saying that we want fries with everything. Sure I want rich services; I’d like autospellcheck in Wordpress PLEASE so I can not have to wonder whether labelled has one or two l’s. But ask me if I would rather have to load Word to read a document or have all the relevant features I want loaded on demand just like the way Word works, only from a net or workgroup cache when needed? So that I can access the services I want from the devices I want when I want them, not sitting around in memory. Right now I’m running five tabs of Firefox, an ftp program, Audacity, iTunes, AIM, Skype, and Finder. Fire up Word? No thanks, when I do that, Firefox and Gmail and Rojo start slowing down.

It’s like having a billion dollars and the only thing you get for that is having to worry about people suing your ass to get some of it. I’ve got a pretty nice HDTV set but where I live I have to jump through hoops to get live HDTV on local channels and besides I am usually not watching TV but listening to it anyway as I hack my way through my inforouter. I’m sure Scoble is right that the mass audience will move to HDTV (not as quickly as he thinks) but my quality of life is increasingly improved by things that are LESS rather than more. I LIKE the lightweight life of Firefox and less noise, more signal. I LOVE it when Gmail sniffs my email and adds a link to loading a GCal window and a map and … Sure, it’s pathetic at the moment in how it sniffs the potential appointment, and I keep having to tell Gmap where I’m starting from. But it’s heading in the right direction, and I have zero reason to bolt.

That’s a powerful meme, Ray, and one that I hope you won’t resist. Entropy has been on Microsoft’s side for a long time, long enough to convince people like Nick Carr that inevitably is its own reward. Yet here I am, one huge fan of all things Microsoft for as long as I can remember, playing Find the Hairball and win a prize. OneNote: great tool for the great Tablet, MIA on the Mac, tied to the Word kernel instead of the RSS center. Gadgets: tied to Windows and maybe the Net, instead of the Widget center and its RSS transport. Sharepoint? What was that great feed I was reading on a Sharepoint blog? Oh yes, nothing.

In a nutshell, driving toward rich feels more like a death sentence than an empowering lightness of being. No one knows better than me that there’s no free lunch (except at a Salesforce event) but where does it say that we like being strapped down to a gurney in order to take advantage of the new workflow. Just because Microsoft is deeply engaged with IT and the enterprise doesn’t mean it has entropy on its side. For me, entropy increasingly means staying on the edge of wakefullness and mining the ideas that spring from the absence of noise, flash, page views, pitches, come-ons, orders, agendas. I like the fact that Word is not prompting me with a little green line to fix the dangling list or strongly recommending I add an "and" where I don’t want one.

On the other hand, I would gladly pay with my attention for a Wordpress/Gmail feature that LEARNED what I want to do with language and prompted me for common mistakes that I make and have to correct over and over again. It would also work wonders for people like Umair Haque who are incredibly intelligent but persistently undermine their text by using the word "it’s" when they don’t mean "it is." Here’s why these ideas are important: 1. They solve problems for me that will save me time and create tremendous allegience to the people who provide them, and 2. They send signals, yes, gestures, that all things are possible in this new model of the living breathing network.

It’s not that Ray doesn’t understand this. It’s that he hasn’t signalled, yes, gestured, that he is paying attention to this fundamental characteristic of the new net. This is no easy page view Memo to Bill here, Ray. This is me saying to you, are you willing to validate the notion embodied in the AttentionTrust’s four principles, namely that our data is ours to own, track, recover, profit by or gift it to others, and in general be in charge of. Note that I am not asking you as a proxy for Microsoft, but you, Ray Ozzie. You see, I had this dream the other day, and came up with a grand sort of unification of the GestureBank architecture, the open pool of anonymous metadata, and the Widget security model that Root.net and other attention clouds are working to integrate into their services. And I believe it represents an opportunity for you and Microsoft to join the community in a (good) disruptive way while preserving your natural constituencies in the enterprise and desktop spaces.

With Scoble gone, you’re also now the Blogger in Chief at Microsoft. I’ll be talking about my dream and Gestures at Gnomedex a week from Friday, and hope you’ll join us or tune in on the webcast. Remember: You’ve got to be in it to win it.

June 18th, 2006

Don't Know Much

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 12:33 am

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From Pinhead Gang Part III comments:

Gentlemen, thank you for those moments on the show when you bring real insights to my understanding of our technological society.

Today’s show reminds me of something I heard on the radio yesterday, "One day older, one day closer to making up crap." (I do not know to whom to attribute this.)

One of the cruelest revelations of getting older is learning how little we know, and how troubling it feels to admit it. It is somehow comforting to hear you going through the same process as me. Thanks for the show. [Richard Rowan]

June 15th, 2006

Big News

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 3:11 pm

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I am happy to say I am speaking at Gnomedex 6 in Seattle.

June 12th, 2006

Cheers

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 10:39 pm

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The complaints about the advertising on Gillmor Gang and Daily continue in the comments. I thought I’d post here to consolidate and try and explain why I’m doing it this way. First, I believe in the power of repetition, as I discuss with Adam Curry on the two part Gillmor Daily we recorded yesterday. The length of the endorsement is basically what I feel it should be, not any specific requirement on the part of Podshow or the sponsor. I try and produce something that I feel accurately represents my views, and in particular, how grateful I am for these fine companies, Podshow in particular and each sponsor as they join the show, that they have decided to support the show and the great talent that appears with me.

Indeed, many of these criticisms are counterweighted with great respect for the show’s creative values, particularly the broad and powerful themes and gathering of minds that make the shows unique. To be sure, the complaints sometimes extend to the audio "quality," to my confrontational style, and so on; all legitimate complaints for which I have varying degrees of concern. The shows may sound unedited, but they’re not: they are sometimes tediously balanced to bring out the essential lack of "quality" in the variations between phone, cell, VoIP, and Skype inputs. But hearing us think is the fundamental production value of the show, and like sausage-making, it’s a messy business.

I appreciate these complaints as much as the praise, not because I enjoy being called clueless, or as Richard in my previous post does, a complete asshole, because these folks are listening. I am willing to be seen as insincere, argumentative, unhappy, a shill, etc., if in return the listener pays attention to the whole package. This at its heart is just as much a business as it is an art, and we all have the right to respect or reject the contract that is implied in the act of listening.

But for my part of the contract, I promise you that whatever I do, whether it appears or even is thoughtless, angry, or lazy, on some level I have made a decision to let it stand, to let it represent me and my credibility or lack of it. Sometimes (maybe too often) I have no clear idea of why I’m letting these things stand. Sometimes I make small cuts to make myself sound better (cutting uhs and y’knows). Sometimes I even cut phrases or sentences or even whole sections, mostly for my own benefit, rarely of others. Long ago, I recorded a conversation with Ray Ozzie and took care to clean it up not just for me but for Ray, to the point where he called me up to thank me for making him sound better. All I had done was to apply the same "rules" to his voice that I apply to my own.

I don’t pretend to be immune to the slings and arrows, however. When they become too shrill or insistent, I find myself retreating from the fray. The conference scene has become that for me, a cruel compromise of ego-stroking and callous-building. This is one of the reasons that the current wave of examination around the so-called attention economy rings so false for me. The notion that attention is the coin of the realm, that the end game is about getting more attention, grates like nails on the chalkboard. I do crave the attention of those I love, but not of those who would attack or feel attacked by what I say to get attention. Valleywag walks along this line, but so far I haven’t felt it malignant like others might. Perhaps it’s Nick’s youth, his comical gears so transparently working to find a gear and thank god failing enough of the time to make it feel a little less than dangerous.

But I’m not handling it well. This forum has become a last refuge before silence for me, and for that I am deeply grateful for Dan Farber’s forbearance. Like Mike Arrington, I look forward to the Gang recording on Friday, and sometimes the flow and a place in the conversation. But as Dave Winer said recently about Bloggercon, sometimes it’s good to change your mind when something’s not working. So I’m going to drink a toast to Scoble and Furrier and Arrington and Om and all the success stories of Web 2.0 and beyond. We need stars, and they are emerging. Life is good.

June 12th, 2006

More Fan Mail

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 4:37 pm

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Scoble - Setting The Record Straight

So Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft. He’s been able to de-mystify Microsoft without being dishonest and without behaving like a shill. I think he’ll do well wherever he goes - he just seems to have that kind of positive drive and energy (Have you ever noticed that he is the complete antithesis of Steve Gillmor? ). It pisses me off however to read this post which apparently broke the story. The author takes pains to sound so authoritative on the situation. Go read Robert’s own blog post which sets the record straight. It’s nice to see that good guys do not always finish last.

posted by RichardQuerin at 8:00 AM

June 9th, 2006

Gang Reforms for Reunion Tour

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 7:32 pm

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Recorded an Attention Deficit Theatre today, and with just a few minutes to go, Doc and I noticed that what had actually occurred was a Gillmor Gang. So I’ll mix this one and skip over last week’s show with Hugh MacLeod to run this one this weekend. That makes 2 shows that may never see the light ofair. Something called Vlogercon starts tomorrow but it’s sold out. Maybe I can sneak in as Dave Winer, who registered. Watched Alex Barnett on Ziff Davis DevSource talking attention–nice to be credited but I knew nothing about Goldhaber until Seth Goldstein introduced me to his work last year. Seth’s partitioned conversation with MG has finally cracked open the treasure chest of the Goldhaber brilliance. Of course, I had to go back to the first post before I started to get it. Never said I was smart, just right.

Had a bunch of great meetings with Ted Nadeau of Root on some mutual strategic planning with GestureBank (a million clicks and clicking) and other Attention 2.0 players, first in NY and late this week on the phone. Adam Curry and I will record Gillmor Daily this Sunday on the subject of user-generated advertising (are you listening Mr. Evil Genius?) and Doc and I will record another ADT Monday. Wednesday is Under the Radar, and the following week is BloggerCon, which I must have signed up for in my sleep. Dave and I will be doing some Gillmor Dailys starting a few days before the ‘Con, and will likely continue through and on to Gnomedex.

Favorite line from the new Gang: You could hear a pinhead drop. [Doc Searls]

June 8th, 2006

ADT Live?

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 3:04 pm

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I’ve been trying to avoid participating in this year’s Gnomedex for some time now, but a few days ago things became more difficult when Chris, Ponzi, Scoble, and Maryam called me from a joy ride in Maryam’s new car. (Note: trolls should already be moving down to the comment section or, more wisely, clicking off to less elitest and more page-view oriented material elsewhere on the Net.) Ponzi in particular was not happy with my stance, which in short was that I didn’t want to come to the show because I have a bad attitude.

Of course, having said bad attitude hasn’t prevented me from foisting my obnoxious perspective on you in a number of mediums, the most recent of which is through the highly experimental Attention Deficit Theatre–which I am currently procrastinating from editing to the point where I’m even considering releasing the jump-the-shark Gillmor Gang that festers in its holding tank in Audacity.

It is in this context that a plan may begin to take shape. If Doc Searls can be persuaded to show up, and likewise Jason Calacanis, then Arrington, who overslept and therefore blew off the first ADT session, and Dan Farber, both of whom will be in Seattle can gather to do a live ADT at lunch on that Friday at noon. Since technically this will not be a session, I get around the formatting being used this year, and Chris has just promised to screw around with random bright lights and lowering the oxygen level to accelerate the ADT experience. So we may have a deal, in which case Ponzi can relax knowing that she has finally set in motion the events that will drag Gnomedex 6 into the tailspin from which it will never recover. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

June 5th, 2006

Memo to ValleyWag

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 9:55 pm

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Snappy the Clam:

Attention deficit

» Memo to Bill Gates | Steve Gillmor’s InfoRouter | ZDNet.com

Head on over for the amusing spectacle of watching the flop sweat start to break out on Steve "Murrow" Gillmor’s face as he tries a Hail Mary play out of the Winer playbook. Watch as Steve disintermediates cold calling. Maybe he should name it the Inattention Trust, or better yet, the Nobody Gives A Shit Trust.

Technorati Tags: bizwhores, webwhores, stupid, whoretrain

June 3rd, 2006

Memo to Bill Gates

Posted by Steve Gillmor @ 2:28 pm

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Bill -

I know you don’t read Dear Bill memos in the media as a rule of thumb, which is why the last time I wrote one of these it was addressed to Steve Ballmer, not you. Then the subject was RSS, and the need to embrace it. Whether you heard us or not, you’ve done just that.

Now the subject is Attention, and the reasons why you should embrace it are as deeply obvious and demanding as were the ones you so effectively responded to when you brought Ray into the company. It’s no secret that Ray is for all intents and purposes running the company now. The "Steve goes if the stock drops below $20" rumors are an unfortunate ValleyWagish analysis of the impact of bringing someone of Ray’s caliber in and bifurcating Jim Allchin’s role into strategic and operational (Kevin Johnson) segments.

With Ray in place, not only Wall Street but more importantly, you can envision letting the company move forward without your 24/7 focus. That’s because you’ve found that person who, like you, can keep this whole thing in RAM inside your head. This obviously paves the way for a Scott McNealy-like handoff-to-Schwartz, but unfortunately also encourages speculation about Steve as well. Unfortunate because a Ballmer step-down would accelerate Microsoft’s troubles at exactly the wrong moment.

Saul Hansell and Eric Lichtblau’s article, U.S. Wants Companies to Keep Web Usage Records, in the New York Times yesterday sent a loud wake-up call:

An executive of one Internet provider that was represented at the first meeting said Mr. Gonzales began the discussion by showing slides of child pornography from the Internet. But later, one participant asked Mr. Mueller why he was interested in the Internet records. The executive said Mr. Mueller’s reply was, "We want this for terrorism."

At the meeting with privacy experts yesterday, Justice Department officials focused on wanting to retain the records for use in child pornography and terrorism investigations. But they also talked of their value in investigating other crimes like intellectual property theft and fraud, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, who attended the session.

Simply put, the Bush Administration wants you, Google, Yahoo, and every other cloud to retain our attention data, the breadcrumbs we leave as we move about the Net, for up to two years rather than the weeks or months the providers currently hold on to the data. And "wants" is a nuanced word, as the article delineates:

In its current proposal, the department appears to be trying to determine whether Internet companies will voluntarily agree to keep certain information or if it will need to seek legislation to require them to do so.

Not only does this move collide with the goals of major cloud aggregators–Google for one has made it clear they will resist such demands as they have to some extent in the past–but it comes into direct conflict with the most potent wave in today’s technology landscape: the user in charge. In a world where we recoil from attempts by spamsters, spyware, and identity thieves to steal our most personal data and use it against us, here comes Big Brother to demand our attention metadata without offering any service in compensation. At least Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo offer us free storage, calendar, or email in return for this data, even if it does go in and doesn’t come back out. There is some sort of voluntary contract between users and providers.

Here’s where the government bait and switch package starts to tick ominously: First it’s about child porn. Everybody’s against that. Then it’s about terrorism. Ditto. But then, while we’ve got that data, let’s go in and help our friends down at the MPAA and RIAA with their business model problem and police Intellectual Property "theft." What about peer-to-peer communications filled with inappropriate political concepts? When we’ve got you by the bitstream, folks, we decide what’s OK, not you.

Slippery slope indeed, and what’s more, for a company like yours that has been significantly disrupted by Google and other attention companies, this is not the best time to be pissing off users and their community by caving to the Attorney General of an administration with sub-30 likeability ratings going into the election.

Contrast this with Ray Ozzie, who marches into the O’Reilly ETech conference and gifts this cool Web clipboard technology and gets nothing but praise and appreciation from this same user community. Citizen Ray hits grandslam on first at bat. What, no aircraft carrier metaphors, 2 years to turn, etc.? Nope, thirty days from idea to demo, and since then a steady stream of reports about wiring in SSE extensions to RSS, and other good messaging from the IE team around RSS. Smart, community-focused, and combined with mainstream media stories about the Ray-led offsite. But I repeat myself: it’s clear Ray has the keys to the Live washroom, and Live is not Dead.

So, Bill, here’s what I strongly recommend:

Do NOT let Steve retire. You don’t have his replacement in place like you do yours.
Do give Ray your job. Let him do things you agree he should do but that he will be trusted for where you might not.
Encourage contribution of attention metadata to an open anonymized pool.

In case you haven’t heard, the AttentionTrust, cofounded by Seth Goldtein and me, gifted an attention recorder (ATX) for use with Firefox. I subsequently launched GestureBank to aggregate attention clickstreams in just such an open pool, building on the ATX and adding a randomly-generated user key with the following caveat: You have to contribute to make use of the pool of anonymous data. GestureBank does not own or store the identity key; it is solely under the control of the user. GestureBank’s IE recorder goes into alpha release next week.

Therefore, if Attorney General Gonzales downloads the recorder and starts contributing he and any of his team who does so will have access to this data, the very same data that they seem to want to force the providers to retain and surrender. But the user is in control, not the cloud. If the government wants to get a court order, they can get it for the only entity that controls the key: the user.

What’s in it for you Bill, or should I say Ray? Community. A reboot of the Passport era. What you’re likely to do anyway. An opportunity to fully absorb the disruptive hit Google et al have dealt you and come up to parity with them. How so? Well, for starters, Attention (and Gestures) are the evolution of Google’s search model, where individuals seek data from the cloud–to an inversion where the cloud (information) searches for the people who are willing to receive their messages. It’s the RSS contract, as is the user in charge contract embodied in the Attention Recorder and the open pool. Google will have to go here too, but they face a similar conundrum to the one you’ve largely absorbed with the marginalization of Office and its impact on your growth.

What does Microsoft lose from this move? Little in terms of their market position. Office continues to control the enterprise, essentially a dongle for Vista. But coming down dramatically and firmly on the user’s side at this moment when Attention is front and center is a gesture that will resonate for years to come. Yahoo is praying you don’t do this, because they’ve been sitting on the opportunity for two years now without having the stones to pull the trigger. Google will join in, just as they have done with RSS/Atom, and everyone else will follow. The only way to stop the government is with everybody rowing in one direction. It’s how the movie ratings board held off the Feds.

Attention is your China, Bill, and only you or you, Ray, can go there.