June 25th, 2006
A Hamburger Today
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.
