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.
June 18th, 2006
Ray in Charge
With my family visiting the in-laws in Charleston, I’m alone here with dog, 3 cats, and 3 (I hope that’s the right number) fish. On Friday I got up late and went down to Podshow for the Fubar Friday company get-together. Sitting with Adam Curry in his cubicle, he asked me what was going on with GestureBank. Implicit in the question–or at least the way he asked it–was whether anything was going on.
Several days earlier, I was floating on the edge of dreams and day-dreaming. It’s a funny zone, where you can literally reach out and touch the ideas and massage them, before waking fully up dissipates them. Once engaged, another rare opportunity presents itself: To let the ideas play themselves out, without being forced to respond to email or kid shit, or any of a million subtle interruptions that we are trying to triage the rest of the time. So, floating back and forth into dreams and out to nurturing the ideas, I actually got somewhere on gestures and the relationship with the platform variously called Attention.
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
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 12th, 2006
Cheers
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
Scoble - Setting The Record Straight
posted by RichardQuerin at 8:00 AM
June 9th, 2006
Gang Reforms for Reunion Tour
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?
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
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
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.
May 27th, 2006
A Cure for the Summertime Blues
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
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
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
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
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
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
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…associat
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
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
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
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
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.
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