Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab

I’ve just launched a new blog over on eWeek.com at http://blogs.eweek.com/newsgang/. In addition to writing the blog, I’ll be working with Ziff Davis Enterprise Editorial Director Mike Vizard on video and audio chats focusing on enterprise issues. For me, this is a return to the enterprise as well as an opportunity to bring together the best of the blogosphere as we grapple with the convergence of cloud computing, social media, and the transformation of 20th century platforms into the disruptive attention-based ad hoc network of today.

I’m not sure of the role GestureLab will play moving forward, but imagine that there may well be some tangents and perspectives not necessarily ready for prime time in the enterprise sense. For now I’ll keep it as is, with the expectations set very low given my infrequent postings over the last year. But as RSS has always empowered, keeping the feed in your reader will work just fine if anything pops up. Perhaps this blog will function something like Crunchnotes does for Mike Arrington. But something tells me I’ll be working hard to sneak everything past the eWeek filter, just as I’ve been doing for years now going back to Ahead of the Curve in InfoWorld and most recently InfoRouter at ZDNet. See you over at NewsGang in a minute.

Microsoft’s Yahoo takeover, whether successful short or long-term, marks an historic change in Microsoft’s perception of its role at the center of the computing universe. Certainly Google’s rise has focused the Redmond mind on the task it must confront, not just with Google’s advertising dominance but also its dagger to the heart of Microsoft’s crown jewels, Office. At its most basic level, the Yahoo deal allows Microsoft to clone Google Apps and blunt the hemorrhaging of a new Net-aware generation away from the current hardware bound Office.

We can argue whether the forced merger of MSN/Live and Yahoo’s services will be easy or difficult, but those who predict distraction and brain drain should remember that Ray Ozzie was the central factor in the IBM/Lotus acquisition that allowed continuity and pragmatics to preside over what turned out to be a successful combination. Notes and Domino achieved a critical mass in resources and seats that it needed to blunt the Y2K Exchange challenge, and IBM bought the time it needed to invest in open source and build out a platform for Global Services to ride on.

Similarly, Microsoft can use the Yahoo seats to deliver an 80-20 version of Office while financing the transition with improved response for brand advertising hung off of Yahoo media properties and rich media services such as Flickr. Banner ads don’t attack Google’s advertiser/relevance stranglehold, but they do pay for the migration to an on-demand Office clone and give Microsoft time to confront the real Google threat: control of an Internet operating system.

Where Windows achieved its lock-in based on control of the hardware base, an Internet operating system requires a different equation: the engagement of the user, or put another way, getting and retaining the attention of the user. This social contract is one where Microsoft has a fighting chance of success, and significantly, one where Google has its challenges. Recent attempts by Google to use data collected in Gmail as social graph gestures with Google Reader shared feeds underline how difficult it is to use data collected under one social contract to seed an emerging one.

Imagine how we would have felt if we were told that the data Google collects in Gmail that informs the suggested links in our private email discussions would be made available to other companies for their marketing purposes. Or the government for census data or the insurance companies for purposes of calculating liabilities for pre-existing conditions. But turn that around and ask the question differently: would users be willing to release their attention data in return for discounts, access to information, membership in special interest groups, and so on? An inversion where the harvesting of behavioral data is released by the user as what I’ve dubbed gestures.

Attention was first proposed in 2004 by Technorati founder Dave Sifry and me as an XML specification called attention.xml. The notion was that the digital breadcrumbs we emit around the network could be captured and transmitted as a simple signature of behavior: who, what, and for how long. In RSS, this breaks down into the feed, the individual post or item, and the length of time spent on the page. In other words, the attention of the user. A clickstream recorder such as the one we released in October 2005, or in fact, the recordings left by us as we browse services from Google, Yahoo, and every other site, are aggregated and processed based on the implicit understanding of the value of the service. What permission do you give us in return for the “free” services that we provide?

Gestures invert the permission model, moving past the inference algorithms of anonymous users to the direct messages of intent. Social networks represent the first cut at this paradigm: I’ll tell the service not only what my behavior is but who my friends are. The service then aggregates the gestures of my friends and streams it to me. So far so good. I can be invited to events, send gestures such as RSVPs that then are broadcast back to my affinity group, and so on. Or via Twitter, I can follow, and generate timely updates on what is happening, what is important to me, and what I want to know more about. But the behavior, the attention data, is not yet being used to filter the gesture stream. The attention data of my friends, when aggregated anonymously, enormously improves the signal to noise of my information system.

Combining attention with the social graph of validated gestures produces a new and extremely valuable economy. An economy where the price of admission is the credibility of the social contract. To reiterate, Gmail already knows what I’m interested in, what I am doing, and especially what my friends and business associates are doing via email, IM, blogging, and Twittering, all of which I am piping into Gmail and Gtalk where it is archived and increasingly made available via Google Reader. Getting permission to use that data is what is hard, not the infrastructure.

So Google has the necessary data but not the required permission. The rise of social constructs such as Facebook and Twitter provide an intermediary for such social contracts. By agreeing upfront to an mapping of behavioral signals (attention) to the explicit social relationships of gestures, services can be constructed that respect the user’s wishes and mine the anonymous aggregate data of the affinity groups that represent targeted qualified streams of intent. Vendors who want access to the efficiency of this marketplace have to respect the signals sent by those users: I am interested in this, don’t spam me with that, support these ideas that I support, introduce yourself to me via those people I respect, and so on.

Microsoft’s opportunity is that Google has changed the playing field from the one Microsoft used to dominate. It’s not so much that Microsoft is no longer the black hat but that in a world of choice, the white hat belongs to the one or ones who respect the user. That is, assuming there is a credible choice for these so-called free services. In fact, the battle is for ownership of the attention operating system, and the only dominant position possible is one of equal choice between two or more credible services.

It’s an odd kind of mutually assured destruction, where Microsoft and Google each are constrained from “winning” by the knowledge that if we can’t be reasonably confident of an alternative, we won’t invest our clicks in any one place. Microsoft can afford to invest in the Yahoo cloud, and can’t afford to destroy that company’s trust relationship with its customers. In other words, they can’t afford not to do this deal. And they can’t afford not to build an Internet OS that equally respects Windows, Linux, and OS/X, as Silverlight does. It won’t be easy for either company to keep going down this road, but luckily they have no choice as long as we do.

Conventional wisdom:

Social advertising doesn’t work because users are there for friends, not buying stuff.
Google reports weak results from MySpace deal, blaming missed numbers on bad estimates of social advertising yield.
Microsoft Yahoo takeover is about advertising.

Problems with that view for me, personally:

I don’t use search. Not externally, that is. I use Gmail search all the time, because my entire breadcrumb trail has been embedded there for 3 years now. So for me, search advertising doesn’t work, at all. My eyeballs are rarely focused on Adsense because they’re mostly focused on Twitter, gmail, and Google Reader shared items as triaged commonly via NewsGang. Mostly, I don’t search data, I search people’s searches of data.

So if search advertising doesn’t work with me (at least directly) what does that say about social advertising. For me, it works better than Google because it’s the affinity groups that I’m valuing, not the expression of my intent through keywords. Key to my information processing is understanding the context of the filter, not the descriptions of the containers or memes that surround the targets. That is the value proposition of Facebook and Twitter, which together conspire to route my attention dramatically more efficiently than previous methods.

Viewed in this lens, the Microsoft attack on Yahoo portends a dramatic shift in Redmond’s ability to capture, or nurture, its relationship with me. First of all, as far as I’m concerned, Facebook already is Microsoft. Its minimal investment may not appear to be golden handcuffs, but the one thing the FB cloud has been is stable. Of course, many folks see Twitter’s instability as a warning sign, but I see it as nicotine marketing and an object lesson for what $300 million can do when applied. I’m sure it’s not lost on Evan and Co. that getting that kind of money with no strings attached lets Facebook (and by definition them) thrive while keeping their options open while they garner market ownership.

So am I buying stuff via Microsoft-vended Facebook-housed social advertising? Probably not. How about Twitter social ads? Definitely. What are Twitter ads? Well, last night Dave Winer tweeted at The Dead’s reunion concert for Obama in San Francisco Monday night. Would I have bought the tickets if I had seen it soon enough? Maybe. Will I watch the streaming simulcast if it doesn’t crash? Probably? What’s the product? Obama. Did I buy it? You bet. I pay the next day with my vote. I pay right now by broadcasting my vote and this model of micro-community viral marketing.

The key here is that the information itself is the advertising. Through Facebook’s infrastructure and Twitter’s call-and-response follow handshake, I establish a gesture feed that attracts the kinds of signals I’m interested in mining. When the Microsoft/Yahoo deal broke, Twitter search brought me to the core British swarm that absorbed the announcement and analyst call before most of us on the West Coast were awake. Again, the people, not the data. Add them to my Twitter cloud, and I’m way ahead of the game. 9 hours for starters.

The monetization, if you will, is in the efficiency of information context. The ideas themselves are not particularly unique; when the sun rose over the east coast, and then out west, the general conversation largely repeated itself: will the Yahoo acquisitions be crushed, what will the VCs do with one less super-buyer, are there other offers, etc. But the history and resonance of the core players we value for their instincts and right (or wrong) guesses — another story completely. Arrington, Wilson, Blodgett, O’Reilly, Searls — you can match up their alliances and strategies with their reactions, and very quickly get a sense of what the Firesign Theatre called the 5th guy in the room, the synthesis of these people’s nuances, prejudices, business agendas, myopia, and humor — all of it combining into this ephemeral visitation known as What may very well happen.

Can Google control that? Not without the consent of those who control this new gestural bottom-up market. They can’t sacrifice a legitimate contract with users without undermining the very heart of their behavioral lead in data. If the person context is decoupled from the data, the quality of the lead crashes precipitously. If I felt that I had lost control of my Gmail data, or its representation in the form of identity profile, no matter how accurate in behavior but devoid of gestural intent, I would leave as quickly as I could. For if I am not represented according to my intentions, then the chances of those whose gestures I want to harvest being credible are similarly compromised. The 5th guy does not materialize.

It is precisely that calculation, and the possibility of a haven to bolt to, that drives the Microsoft Yahoo play. In this context, Microsoft’s belittled investment in Facebook can be seen as an investment not in last year’s advertising model but in the coming wave of user-vetted gestural partnership with information sources — with its much higher quality, yield, and translation to action. What Microsoft is buying is the people, not their accumulated data, and as we know from failed mergers of the past, an ongoing relationship with those people can only be maintained through a two-way contract that doesn’t violate user perception of transparency.

Live as Lifeboat:

What would it take to dump Gmail? Initially, nothing would make me even consider it. The longer I stay there, the more effective searches are for historical data - the random phone number, threads, do I know who this guy is already, clues for finally doing back expenses long after I’ve forgotten the details of the trip. I’ve only started using Google Calendar in earnest since the advent of the iPhone, so these mini-clues in Gmail go back much further.

The same is true for Google Docs — now starting to build up a backlog of documents — but I’ve used Gmail as a text repository with its spell-checking and auto-save since I abandoned Office 2 years ago. These features have migrated to Docs and Wordpress, but again only recently. So what would it take to migrate away from such a deep data store?

Wait, there’s more to tether me, namely IM. As Gtalk and iChat have converged in recent months, I’m piping most of my iChat/AIM chats into Gmail via Gtalk, where the Gmail integration persists the chat stream as part of the Gmail search store, adds threading, and blurs the distinction between IM and email by caching conversations when the other party goes offline. Invariably, the single search methodology encourages persisting phone numbers, links, project development, brainstorming, and note-taking in the chat window. The ability to pin the embedded window outside the Gmail window lets me aggregate all this data while navigating the other key parts of my UI.

Those other windows are increasingly dominated first by Facebook, and more recently, Twitter. More and more I’ve been using Twitter as an email gateway via direct messages, emulating the similar transition Facebook has gone through in inserting the body of an FB message into email. In both cases, it’s as simple as clicking on the direct message link to be inserted in the reply window of the incoming Twitterer or Facebook respondent. Although Twitter’s pipe into Gtalk has been down for the last few days, in general I have little reason to bolt and more and more reason to stay, as long as the various services maintain this piping flow in and out. So, again, why leave?

No reason. To leave, that is. But to migrate, every reason. And the Twitter virus suggests the method of transfer. Twitter’s follow/follow protocol establishes a contract between users that provides immediate benefit: you tweet something to the group of followers, I want to reply directly, I have established two-way identity credentials, I click on the @you link and then on the direct message link to reply. 2 clicks.

But wait, Twitter direct messages also leverage the hidden email address and present the same message in (for me) Gmail. I click on the link to the Tweeterer’s direct message page and respond. 1 click. This same methodology presents itself in Facebook email. In one fell swoop, the email client and social media clients are hidden behind an interoperability layer. The identity handshake is maintained while abstracting out the email client, the browser, the hardware, and certainly the so-called operating system. It’s platform relationship management, Doc.

What’s transcendent here is the relationship between senders, the social protocol, the contract between the individual and his or her affinity group of 1 or many. As long as the cloud service respects the privacy of my data in a consistent way across its offerings, I have no reason to switch. Of course, other clouds could offer the same service with additional incentives, but the baseline is user control of the social relationships. The data store is a commodity, albeit an expensive problem to maintain at enormous scale. The social relationships are the value that the user controls, the price the platforms must negotiate to access the efficiency of the next market.

Again, both Twitter and Facebook have identical interfaces to route the data via the social contract, thereby creating the beginnings of a new operating system. The user inexorably gravitates toward a single best practice; I’ve surprised myself at the speed with which I’ve migrated away from IM to this direct message model. The number of clicks dominates, as does the social context of the communication. Why gesture to the amorphous cloud when I can get much greater signal to noise by twittering or Walling to a group that has formed around gestures of interest in each other.

So the strategic investment is in mirroring the functionality of the service while abstracting out the best practices of the new uber-platform. If it’s easy and intuitive for me to pipe my TwitterGang cloud through Gtalk into the Google store, why not also pipe it into, say, the Live store. Of course, both platforms need to respect my transparency requirement, for what I want is data security as a given but identity and social security as an absolute requirement. That’s why Google’s refusal to cop to the egregious violation of my social contract by harvesting “friend” data assembled in Gmail via its Contact algorithm and using it to release my Google Reader shared items to people I may or may not want to view them retroactively is such a huge red flag.

You can’t have a 5th guy emerge until you have 4 guys already in the room. As long as Google continues to be the only player, I’ll put up with their stonewalling. But ever since WordPress adopted Gmail’s spell-check and autosave, I’ve migrated away to the container I’m typing in because it’s 3 less clicks for the copy and paste move I used to do. That’s 2 guys. Twitter, 3. Facebook, 4. The 5th guy starts to become clearer in the abstraction of the core services across 2 or more virtually identical containers. Can Microsoft play in this new sandbox? Just ask the 5th Guy.

Today we recorded a new daily show, NewsGang Live. It is designed to take the fundamentals of The Gang and mix them with the daily flow of news and views that emerge from the NewsGang application. Today’s live show focused on last night’s Democratic debate in South Carolina, and featured members of The Gang (Dan Farber, Doc Searls, Dana Gardner) as well as Obama supporter Mitchell Kertzman and Edwards supporter Dave Slusher, plus several listeners including Chris Kelley who joined the end of the show with some Republican perspective.

The format of the show grows out of the most recent Gang episode, where Jason Calacanis gave out enough of the dial-in information on Twitter to attract some 20 additional callers, one of which, Larry Miller, joined the show and contributed both to the interesting aspects of the show and my gathering perception that the show is not working effectively to capture and nurture those aspects of The Gang and its predecessor The Gillmor Gang that endear it to both participants and listeners. Today’s NewsGang suggests that a careful mixture of various elements may produce a product that will justify continuing this work, though it is not clear to me that the members of the core Gang can work effectively together in the original structure.

On the second part of the last Gang, I clearly set out my requirements for the show. Much of the dichotomy of the show’s agenda revolves around what to some (including many of the Gang members) is seen as 2 subject domains: enterprise technology and Web 2.0. In fact, the show can, and does, frequently blend these two spaces into one, with entertaining and empowering results for Gang and audience. However, another split is more fundamental and elusive, namely the fault line between so-called new and old medias. Many of the show’s participants live comfortably and profitably in one or the other of these camps, and the conflicting business models of these domains often surface in the discord that undermines the show.

There’s been a vigorous conversation on Facebook on the Gillmor Group Wall and comments on Part II of The Gang XI. I may have too thin a skin for some of the repetition and the occasional painful dig (”passive/aggressive crap” from another Gillmor no less) but above and beyond the debate about production styles and critical analysis lies the simple truth that what we’re doing here has meaning for a lot of people, particularly those of us who keep hanging in and failing as much as succeeding at this.

So now I’m going counter-intuitive by adding a new show that may well deliver all of the dilution that I’ve tried to avoid with The Gang. Back in the Podshow days, I produced a second show as part of my contract, Gillmor Daily, that I never felt was a net positive although it did produce the much beloved Attention Deficit Theatre episodes and the first appearances of Mike Arrington before I invited him into The Gang proper. Just got a call from Tom Foremski, my compatriot at PodTech for much of 2007: he tuned in to only a little bit of the first NewsGang because, as he admits, he’s sick of the whole political topic that the first show covers.

But those of us who do find last night’s debate compelling theater may listen, and perhaps the audience will build as we veer back into the tech comfort zone. Those who explore NewsGang itself have found it an efficient rollup of the media spaces, and frankly, the goal was to harness the unique and focused affinities of The Gang community to cull the excesses of both “old” and “new” medias. I’m reasonably confident I can hang on long enough without offending either camp to achieve a critical mass in the NewsGang domain; the usage has gown ten-fold in the last month, and should accelerate as users discover and follow the NewsGang Twitter feed and NewsGang Active widgets as they are adopted by other sites.

Economically it’s a real struggle right now, but I’m as confident of the eventual outcome as I was when I started The Gillmor Gang with even less indication of its eventual power and leverage. But don’t misunderstand my confidence; it may have little to do with my personal success or the security of my family or my ability to sustain this. Already my tolerance for the debate about the debate inside The Gang has reached a breaking point. Enjoyable as the show can be even in its train wreck status, I can’t sustain the acquiescence of the divergent members for ephemeral moments in a sea of crossed agendas.

NewsGang Live was conceived among other things as a valve in this pressurized container, to bleed off the excess gas emanating from the usual suspects, particularly me, who is sick and tired of being petulant, angry, and unfortunately, right about how dismally ineffective I’ve been in managing the explosive fame of some of the Gang members and the quiet wisdom of some of the others who get shorter shrift. Hopefully NewsGang will prove as successful in squeezing out the noise as it has in doing so in the information space for those of us who were hooked on it from Day One, but we’ll see. Come Friday, I’m hopeful that The Gang will reconvene. Stay tuned.

Started the day with the latest salesforce.com event at the Palace, the first of a hundred-city Tour de Force to evangelize developers into the Force.com development as a service (DAAS) platform now up and running. Marc Benioff and Marc Andreesen had a fireside chat where they seemed to be interested in the similarities between salesforce’s enterprise Web services and Ning’s consumer Web services. In fact, they are sitting on opposite sides of the elephant and somehow don’t see that there is virtually no distinction. As Marc A. noted, entrpreneurs now have the ability to put a startup on its feet for virtually (keyword) no money, making investment (from Marc’s perspective) safer. Of course, Marc B.’s strategy is to grow his developer cloud, or in Marc the Other’s terminology, makes commitment to the Force platform “safer.” As Andreesen noted, all you need is a bunch of MacBook Pro’s and a Net connection.

At lunch I sat next to the new salesforce executive in charge of all things developer, and she told me of her response to the question of what metric would be used as a success indicator: “How many developers sign on by the end of the week.” Benioff blew a little smoke about how the Oracle and Sun deals represent the end stage of the last generation of dev tools, suggesting we were now moving into dev services. I say smoke because it was gratuitous to raise the competitive spectre at the very moment when the combination of services and Eclipse rendered the old way improved not deprecated.

But Andreessen is also subtly overselling when he interweaves the notions of services and social. Of course the massive scale of virtualized services resembles social networks. To the user they are identical. Abstracting salesforce’s servers or Amazon’s or Ning’s or Facebook’s or, most tellingly, composite services that aggregate all of these sources and more into a service architecture that runs on top of all these social networks — that’s what is now enabled. Benioff acknowledged as much, and in so doing, presaged the real dynamic of the next few months, as producers make distribution deals for their new pictures.

I use the record/movie business analogy because the lesson of Apple’s MacWorld announcements is that services are the commodity, and targeted visibility drives the revenue. If software is marketed as entertainment then how does it reach its audience? If Ning and salesforce have no distinction, then an information service that visualizes digital theater licensing workfow inside a distributed corporation (Dolby) is virtually indistinguishable from a movie rental platform that sits across Apple TV, Air, and iPhone/iTouch.

Viewed as such, the salesforce developer pitch is to incent code creation that can be reused across both consumer and enterprise domains, because the differentiator is access to the executive decision makers via their committed information delivery systems. Should a business process identify the signature of a merger/acquisition target, the strategic marketing opportunity is to present the rollup of the business imperative of the deal as quickly as possible to a virtual consensus of decision makers. It’s business process modules as a service, abstracted across the alleged domains of business and pleasure.

Ended the day with Dave Winer’s first public demo of his FlikrFan screensaver project. Where Force demos bore the breadcrumbs of Winer’s early work in source code references to SOAP, FlikrFan’s services subtly hinted at an emerging platform of dynamic RSS feed generation, or RAAS. I’ll leave that to another day, but you can be sure Dave is already several steps ahead of the market he largely created. Benioff and Andreesen would do well to pay attention.

Given Jobs’ purported secret meeting with Bill Gates in CES Vegas last week, I was on maximum alert today for Redmond DNA at the MacWorld keynote and aftermath. It helped that a Microsoft PR official denied the existence of the meeting, which only served to make it all the likelier that it occurred. Why call attention to it if there was no substance to it? Or put another way, if it did occur, and it was secret enough to escape the camera phone grid in Vegas, wouldn’t Microsoft PR have to deny it. Or maybe PR was out of the loop too a la Ron Ziegler.

Other than a pushback from an HP guy to the effect that Craig Mundie said Silverlight integration with the iPhone would never happen, there were no obvious clues in the lobby after the SteveNote. Of course, in keeping with the PR denial, the fact that I made up the Silverlight scenario out of whole cloth made it more than a little interesting that an HP official had actually discussed such a thread with Mundie before I had even made it up. Given the wave of exits from Microsoft Classic in recent weeks (Jeff Raikes, Charles Fitzgerald, Gates’ glidepath) my bet is whatever Mundie says may be irrelevant in the reasonably near future. But then you have to examine the breadcrumbs Jobs sprinkled around Moscone West.

For starters, the transitional upgrades to both the iPhone and Apple TV auger well for Jobs’ continued accupuncture approach to finding pressure points on the body politic of the carrier and cartel communities. Get static from NBC and competition from Amazon and the record companies… switch over to the movie rental business and resuscitate Apple TV in one nifty move. Decouple Apple TV from the Mac and Windows, and Steve sends a loud message to the record companies too: watch the iPhone go tetherless next and regain the lion’s market share. And Time Capsule combined with a free upgrade and a lowered price point suddenly turns Apple TV into a child management system in HD without having to wait for BlueRay to drop into the adoption zone.

The iPhone upgrade offers another clue in the Google containment scenario. The Maps location functionality is augmented by an additional GPS workaround with WiFi to supplement the cell tower triangulation now commoditized across every other mobile platform. Broadcast SMS keeps us connected across both the iPhone network and the downlevel rest of the market, including smart and even dumb phones as receivers. Webclips deliver application status to the iPhone home screen two months ahead of SDK apps and suggests that the value add of native apps will be integration of offline storage and rich services. Hmmm — how will that be delivered?

Flash? Nope. Java FX? Never. Google Gears? Maybe but only as a caching mechanism for text. Let’s see, what multimedia service fabric will work equally well across Windows and OS/X and Linux other than those two which Apple has frozen out of the loop? Could it be Silverlight? Does Apple want to let Google control the RIA turf with the possibility of an Android-seeded nullification of the Apple leverage over the carriers and cartels? Build it anew and have less clients than Dennis Kucinich has voters? Or partner with Microsoft and continue to exploit the advantage of control of the entire device to maintain market dominance to wield against the content and bandwidth suppliers?

More breadcrumbs: Office ‘08 ships on the MacBook Air DVD-less, over the air. Apple TV sucks down rentals (aka software) over the air computer- and DVD-less. If Entourage and the rest of Office were to move to a Silverlight platform, the iPhone, Air, iMac devices would be the Rolls Royces of computing devices in the enterprise. The Intel Trojan horse that Jobs has so strategically exploited will complete the takeover of the PC from within, particularly if iPhone 2.0 includes Intel chips. It’s hardware plus services, something the new guard at Microsoft can live and prosper with.

Like the Presidential campaign, it’s not who is most experienced or most viral or any of that. Rather, it’s who’s left after the least are gone. All the religious arguments — closed versus open in particular — are left in the dust by our desire to live as much in the future as we can. How else to explain the power of the iPhone to upend the usage patterns of 1.0 mobile devices and create a small but highly influential class of users who live as much or more on the mobile Net as they do on the corporate and home networks. With 2% device share, the iPhone has beaten and now runs a close Obama second to devices with a 43% share. One device works on the Net; the other sort of does. Game over.

Now Apple TV is refreshed with a sidestep of the HD conundrum. Switch to cable for HD because satellite has less capacity? Or wait until BlueRay drops below a hundred bucks? No need, particularly if you already have one gathering dust. Upgrade your backup and Airport to Time Capsule and watch as HD podcasts come to life around the free transport and advertiser subsidy built into the Apple TV model. Who’s threatened here? Netflix, Blockbuster, and the TV networks who better settle their ass soon with the writers before the public catches on to the fact that the presidential campaign seems to have continued right through the strike without a hiccup and with far more drama, humor, and cliffhangers. The soaps never recovered from the OJ trial, you know.

Apparently nobody considered what would happen if the razor was software-upgradeable. Nobody but Steve Jobs, that is. The best moment of the Air demo was when Steve pinched and expanded a picture with the now-familiar iPhone multi-touch move, the one I’ve seen people reach out to their current screens and unconsciously attempt to do without thinking. Free upgrades across a wireless grid of devices send a powerful message that everybody wants in on.

Just back from New York and the mixdown sessions for David Sanborn’s terrific next record. So I get on the JetBlue 8AM and about 20 minutes out, the woman two seats in front of me suddenly bolts out of her seat and runs to the rear of the plane. As she passes me she says some guy just took out a lighter and sparked it. The flight attendant calmly walks up to this idiot (one of two) and removes the lighter from his hand.

Now, those of us who follow the news remember that this scenario is Number 1 on the list of things not to do on an airplane. I’m sure some people ignore the instructions/warning that lighting up in the bathroom is not permitted, but right out in the open? After a few tense minutes scanning the passengers to see if any air marshal types seemed plausible, I made my way back to the attendants and asked them what they thought. The net was that they were keeping an eye on these two and the situation was under control.

We had been at the studio until 2 and the wakeup was for 5, so I was tired. However, I had no intention of taking my eye off these clowns, who were doing their best to look as suspicious as possible: Cheech would go to the bathroom, while Chong would turn around and look down the aisle somewhat blankly. When one would return, the other would go. The second guy made a big show of ordering as much liquor as possible, though I think the strategy on the crew’s part was to comply once with 2 small bottles and then cut them off. It worked; eventually one and then the other fell asleep.

On landing at SFO, the captain apologized for a 10 minute wait for our gate to clear, then without comment seemed to move to a different gate. After 3 hours of tension and another 3 of ebbing concern, I was just glad we were finally ready to deplane when 4 cops came aboard and removed the two. They also asked who had seen the incident — “anybody else see what these numbskulls were doing?” — and took 3 witnesses aside for statements. Tina called me to say she’d seen Jason twittering from the same terminal, so I walked down a couple of gates and had some coffee with him. As I left to go to baggage claim, I encountered the two morons walking in the terminal and asked the cops what the story was. Apparently the duo were getting written up and flagged by TSA, but were free to go.

The subtext of all this is: a) the two flight attendants (middle-aged women) had the situation firmly in hand, and b) I was watching them like a hawk and at no time saw them do what they obviously in retrospect did, which was to communicate with the pilots and they with the ground. The delay on landing was likely a subterfuge to approach these guys as quickly and calmly as possible and get them to stand up and be put under control without alarming those (most of the passengers) who had been unaware of the incident. In general, the strategy on the flight was to not escalate the situation by confrontation, but closely observe and keep the attitude low key but aware. It was impressive in its calm but alert methodology.

I still think the cops should not have let them go given the oddness of their behavior after the initial event. But everything I saw was convincing in its careful use of power, and I guess they know what they’re doing. And I sure hope these two have a real tough time traveling for at least a while.

Fred Wilson makes an excellent case for why users should be more aware of where their data is being harvested. He raises concerns about Google’s aggressive march toward what can be loosely described as a data monopoly, where the scale of the pool of data creates a barrier to entry points for the startups Fred so ably funds and arbitrages. We can forgive his wrapping this economic imperative in a clarion call for the protection of innovation, but his point is valid as far as it goes.

How far that is depends on what you think about what he calls open data. Here’s how Fred puts it:

We need an open data movement, but that may not be enough. We may also need a platform shift. The web seems so much like an end state that it is hard to imagine what that platform shift might look like or when it might happen. I am not going to predict the nature or the timing of this platform shift, but I will point out one thing. The data that drives all of the most valuable web services is contributed by users as they interact with these services. The shift that unlocks another era of innovation will occur when users begin to understand their role in this ecosystem and have the tools at hand to direct what is now an unconscious contribution in a way that insures continued innovation on their behalf.

This sounds right on the surface; who could be against open data? Who could reject the notion that we have a right to control what happens to our behavioral data when we emit it around the network? Well, the answer for some time now is Web companies have offered services for “free” that carry an implied contract: ‘you get the software, you give us the data.’ The contract to date has not been ‘you get the software, you give us the data, we give you the data back so you can take it elsewhere.’

Part of the reason that hasn’t happened is that people have been happy with Gmail and Google Apps and Google Reader and so on. The lock-in has been user-mandated, a virtual frequent flier program: ‘you keep making it better; I’ll book more flights.’ ‘You make it all work best on the iPhone and I’ll trust you some more.’ After all, the guy who’s sounding the alarm here is responding to a lock-out not of users, but the competitive dynamics of his business. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong, just not necessarily a proxy for the user. Thus the save-the-innovation theme.

Indeed, the other recent alarm about open data, in this case the social graph crisis, was sounded by Google itself, in apparent response to Facebook’s approaching a strategic (and hard-to-dislodge) developer monopoly in the social network layer. Again, users continue to vote in great numbers for Facebook’s contract, suggesting that in the absence of a competitive contract offering, why change? As long as no credible counter-offer appears, privacy and loss of data control are offset by the notion of ‘I signed a contract and I’ll keep delivering as long as they do.’

So the politics of open are trumped by the fair play of good price for good service. Microsoft achieved its hegemony by subsidizing the cost of word processing while building in presentation, spreadsheet, multimedia, networking, and eventually the operating system formerly know as Windows (the browser), all for a commodity price less than the original single app. Software became electricity. We bundle electricity with the rent or mortgage and taxes, or at least think of it that way.

Fred: “what is now an unconscious contribution.” Not so sure about that Fred. At each stage of what you call platform shift, the user knows full well what the contract is. When Office was built out, I couldn’t hurry fast enough to kill WordPerfect and Lotus and even Netscape with abandon. Short-sighted? Perhaps, but Netscape morphed into Google somehow in spite of the great evisceration, didn’t it. Dave Winer and a few stubborn just-good-enoughers outlasted enough of the groovebusters to see the day when a single laptop can generate content that will ultimately stand alongside the media industries as equal and in some cases dominant partners. That laptop may be a Mac or an iPhone and we may struggle with the contract from time to time, but unconscious? No.

If not unconscious then what? I’ve sat in a conference room for a long afternoon with Fred, and I doubt he’s looking around for someone to crack open Google or Facebook or fight his battles for him. He’s smart and direct and comfortable with stating his case without a lot of indirection. But the tone of his pitch to users is that they need to become more aware of their power in supporting a platform shift that he doesn’t make a case for (he’s saving that prediction for his partners perhaps.) The pitch again: contribute [our] data in ways that insure continued innovation on [our] behalf.

That says to me, keep doing what you’re doing, support apparently closed platforms like Apple and data moats like Google and identity gulags like Facebook, and not wait around for the empty promise of an open data movement. It obviously seems counter-intuitive and politically suicidal, but so far I’ve moved my data from one to the next just in time to take advantage of a Golden Age of opportunity and leverage that from all signs is in its early stages. I’m not looking for Fred or anybody else to insure continued innovation on my behalf; I’m counting on Fred to insure it on his behalf. I’ll take it from there.

We don’t need to mandate open data; it’s already ours to begin with. We don’t have to threaten Google if they start acting untrustworthy, as they are doing with the muddy tying of an opt-out-less “friending” link between Gtalk and Google Reader shared feeds. Instead, we just vote with our feet by pruning those contacts that are serendipitous and not necessarily worth sharing out gestures with without some more stable two-way contract. In other words, we back out of the mini-contract until Google refreshes our confidence in their judgment. The contract is self-correcting. We have to keep the contract open; the data is already ours.

Some guy on CNN:

“I can’t think of a single credential the man has. He’s been in the Senate for two years.”

Jeff Raikes in the New York Times:

TO Mr. Raikes, the company’s third-longest-serving executive, after Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer, the Google challenge is an attack on Microsoft that is both misguided and arrogant. “The focus is on competitive self-interest; it’s on trying to undermine Microsoft, rather than what customers want to do,” he says.

On The Gang this week, Mike Arrington interrupts a tangent into politics to return to the more comfortable world of tech. Sorry Mike, there’s no refuge there. On Charlie Rose, Bill Clinton talks up John Edwards to downsize the Hillary implosion in Iowa. Obama responds to Bill’s lack-of-experience charge by quoting Bill from ‘92 to the contrary. Stand by your woman, Bill.

Yes, Jeff, it’s true Microsoft is in a strong position, but it’s because of Google and Apple, not in spite of them. If Google’s strategy is misguided, then why talk about it? If Obama is so wet behind the years, then why bring up Hillary, who was there the whole time but as George Will put it, fumbled the only two times she got the ball, the Attorney General and health care?

Arrogant? Competitive self-interest is a Microsoft trademark. And the old “customers aren’t asking for it” is such a pile. Since when do customers want to spend real money on Office instead of free dynamically refreshed apps that just work 90% of the time. If that were the case, then why is Microsoft offering to trade users’ attention data for a desktop full of the latest Windows and Office? This is where the New York Times and Google miss the boat.

Microsoft, for historical and now tactical reasons, is in a strange and very powerful position of underdog in the Battle for Office. They have somehow gotten it into their corporate head that respecting the user is a viable business practice. The real war here is for the user on the ground, just like the caucus goers in Iowa. With Microsoft backend technologies reaching a critical mass just before Election Day, the voters can make essentially an equal choice between Redmond and Mountain View. And it will come down to which candidate they like better.

This wouldn’t be so important if Microsoft were operating in a vacuum, but they’re not. The primaries are about surviving the rush to the bottom, where all the candidates are vetted and we end up deciding who we like best by pushing the others down the stack. Google has been lucky so far in operating in the shadow of Microsoft’s ’90’s mistakes and more recently Facebook’s stutter with Beacon.

But while Microsoft is up-front about establishing a contract with users for their gestures, Google rolls out a feature of Google Reader that ignores users’ privacy. Suddenly the completely unrelated act of chatting on Gtalk with someone who guesses your gmail name is used as permission to reveal your shared feed’s address and data to any of the above. It’s not that I am particularly worried about it; it’s just that the only way people could access the unguessable URL before was by having it publicly shared in email or a blog post. Certainly not by a tangentially-related contract where the only opt is out by manually hiding the contacts of those you don’t want to have see your shares, or by globally deleting the whole store. Now that’s arrogant.

And while the argument will be that Google has not violated the user’s privacy legally, neither did Beacon. Both technologies are early forays into the value of gestural data, about which readers might want to look with suspicion at those who say they don’t understand what I’ve been talking about for several years. Microsoft gets it, and they’re putting their software where your gestures are. And the one who levels with its users will trump the alleged benefits of a manufactured change agent. Get it together Google, the whole world is watching.

It may come as a surprise to many of us, but not Ray Ozzie, that he has won the war. While everyone from Nick Carr to the group of consultants known as the Enterprise Irregulars tilt at the Windmill formerly known as ERP, Microsoft has suddenly emerged with some incredible momentum courtesy of Scott Guthrie, the Silverlight team, and Steve Jobs.

Six years I sat in a Microsoft offsite with Jon Udell and watched Guthrie roll out a slick Ajax-based plug-in for Visual Studio that created ASP.Net apps on the fly. It would be another 18 months before the code surfaced in production, but today Guthrie is the closest thing to Bill Gates at the server level. Asked about Silverlight as a Flash killer, he said:

We’re going to get Flash downloaded onto everything in the universe — Silverlight downloaded on everything in the universe just like Flash. There will be that runtime everywhere. It’s small, it’s no big deal. It used to be that memory was so limited, that you couldn’t have multiple of anything, but here it’s just fine.

Fine, basic Bill blocking and tackling, we’re playing Moore’s Law the Home version. But then a real smoker down the middle:

So, the choice is much more at the designer level, and I don’t know whether we’ll — we’re just investing in it, we think it’s a really great thing. Scott knows a hundred times more about it than I do.

I simply can’t recall Bill Gates acknowledging, no, celebrating a deeper knowledge. Certainly it’s a marker of the transition Bill is in as he moves to his Foundation mid year, but what’s more fundamental is his anointing of Guthrie at such a strategic level. Parse the whole clip again. We’ve got the speed and bandwidth and local storage to make the runtime trivial, we’ve abstracted other runtimes out of any power to disrupt our move onto the browser, we’re within months of injecting .Net into the Web architecture, we have an advanced server fabric and developer tooling to instantiate this platform ubiquitously at the Cloud level, and we have serious revenue at the server layer after years of investment.

What’s transformative about this handoff is the way that this work, under way for easily 7 years, so seamlessly plugs into Ray Ozzie’s memo and press launch of the Software plus Services strategy in San Francisco several years ago. We all know the aircraft carrier analogy about Redmond, where it takes so long to turn the ship. In this case, the rudder was turned just in time — 7 years ago. Similarly, the work on the Tablet PC was forged in the same time frame, the XML framework and communications servers, Hailstorm, and all the other things today instantiated by… who?

Right. Google and Apple. The iPhone is the revenge of the Tablet, as Google Apps is to Hailstorm. Combine the two, and you have a dynamic relationship that is empowering users to switch off of Office and even Windows to the new OS, where Windows and Linux and Solaris and OS/X are abstracted by SilverLight et al runtimes. Does it make a difference whether the runtime is Flash or Silverlight to the iPhone user? Does it make a difference to the user whether the document creation engine lives on the hard drive or is acceptably and intelligently cached where needed between cloud and device?

When these distinctions become invisible to users, the economics of the distributed virtualized model become impossible to stop. With the iPhone, we are already there: despite the ephemeral latency issues of the Edge debate, the on-demand nature of the experience trumps any other system based on access alone. Applications that manage collaborative communications in near-enough real time are not simply competitive with the static firmware model, they force the previous generation of apps to reinvent themselves or be abandoned.

This is not a Google Apps versus Office fight, therefore. This is an Office versus Office fight. If there is no perceptual difference between Office HardDrive Edition and Office Cache Edition, users won’t care and will move based solely on ease and lowered cost of deployment. And guess who knows a hundred times more than Bill Gates about this. Scott Guthrie and at the uber level, The Father of Replication aka sync aka intelligent caching Ray Ozzie. Not pigeonholing Ray here, just pointing out work that in Ray’s case started in the 20th Century with Notes. This is Ray’s plan, folks.

What keeps this strategy on the rails is Steve Jobs and the iPhone. The iPhone encourages Google to remaster their apps on the viral Web platform, and in the process strengthen the Safari/Firefox/Opera alliance and keep Internet Explorer pinned down. This in turn encourages Facebook, Fandango, etc. to write iPhone gateways into their architecture and stitch them into a user-controlled federation of just-good-enough applications that encourage iPhone adoption as a route around IT blocking of social media sites.

This wave of quasi-enterprise apps allows the Office Cache team to gain a foothold around IT similar to the Windows 95/Windows for Workgroups/Office 97 Trojan Horse that sealed the Office suite route of productivity apps. Again, if the server source is invisible to users, they will go with whatever user contract provides the most benefit for them. I don’t care whether it’s a Google server or a Facebook server or Salesforce or whatever combination, as long as it works on my iPhone.

Faced with such powerful forces aligned around the iPhone fundamentals, Ozzie has all the tools needed to realize his goals. Office and Windows revenue will continue to fuel the hardliners inside Redmond who seek to frame the discussion as protecting Office at all costs. But time is on Ozzie’s side, as the only thing Microsoft has every succeeded in overcoming is competition from within, and software plus services mandates that the Office elders bend, not Ray. With allies like Scott and Steve, he’s got all the power he needs.

Richard Shulman via Facebook email — quoted with permission

Towards the end of part two in the discussion about social networks, we were treated to classic Steve Gillmor in the way of “The garden isn’t walled right now” and “.. there is no technical lock-in”.

I discovered your podcasts in 2006, part of the treat of listening to you (when I was able to understand at least half of what you were talking about) was listening to the pronouncements that provoked cries of disbelief, incomprehension and outrage from the group. “office is dead” was the best example. Podcast participants would try calmly (or not) to explain to you the obvious facts of Office’s dominance, health and rosy prospects to no avail. “Office is dead” you would repeat with absolute certainty and perhaps a bit of disdain for those who couldn’t see what was so obviously clear to you.

At first I joined in with those who shook their head at the silliness of the declaration, but slowly over time I started to understand both the point and the process. You peer into the future seeking to understand how technology can alter the paradigms of the present. You look at what might possibly be and once you have a vision of that future it is transformed into the present tense. Seeing that Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop would change in importance once the platform changed from the desktop to the cloud and how office-like services could be provided separate from the operating system that was their lock on applications, you declared “Office is dead”. What was in your mind’s eye became the obvious present truth and usage facts and revenue figures be damned.

Now it’s the data lock-in of a walled garden. You’ve seen the technology that allows data to flow from one application to another and the paradigm changes that will come from that and therefore confidently declare “The garden isn’t walled right now”. Of course others on the show focused on the here and now argue in disbelief that the opposite is true and that you (not being a user) just don’t understand. A classic Gillmor moment. I loved it.

The first step in understanding you sometimes is not figuring out whether you’re right or wrong but guessing what unique time zone half of you is operating in. Whenever it is, keep straddling between the then and now. Keep doing the show. It’s always an education.

Last Friday we recorded a new show titled The Gang. I’m initially asking those interested in hearing the results to join this Facebook group. Looking forward to seeing you there.

Part two of our discussion at SFO

This iPhone War is really starting to get to me. Not the loss of trust Frank Shaw proclaims. Not the BSM (BlogStreamMedia) attempt to gin up the GPhone as the next wave. Not even Doc Searls’ Cluetrain-rattling about Google’s advertising lock as promoted by Scripting News. No, it’s just the idea that any of this is going to slow the iPhone down.

If we wait long enough, the Web 2.0 bubble will surely burst. That XML thing is too verbose, too unsupported by legitimate standards bodies, too geeky to be adopted by the mainstream. (You can substitute any of the XML infantry for the parent layer; try RSS.)

Facebook is not worth $10 billion. Microsoft will not die. Robert Scoble can’t keep a secret.

Believe this crap if you want to. But don’t bet the farm on it.

Steve Jobs may or may not be a nice guy; I have no idea and don’t care. He is responsible for the majority of the tools that I use every day in my work: iMac, Macbook Pro, iChat video, Final Cut Pro, iPhone. I await the next OS/X eagerly for many enhancemets that will translate directly into the quality of the media I produce, the value of the network I run, and the conversation I’m lucky to be a part of because these tools make it impossible for gatekeepers to shut me out of.

Since the iPhone’s release on the 29th of June, I have shifted substantial portions of my computing landscape to the new platform. Podcasting, which I am proud to have been a leader in accelerating with The Gillmor Gang, established the synching platform as a viable route-around of the Clear Channel cartel. Now, with the dreaded 1.1.1 upgrade opening the door to WiFi synching, however crippled in its initial instantiation, we’re at the doorway of the flowering of both audio and video data. The ticket to ride is an RSS feed and a business model.

Without an RSS ingress, you can’t bypass iTunes to get a track onto the iPhone; believe me, I’ve tried and can tell you precisely when the work-around broke. So for now, I’ll use whatever extant tools, like this blog, to drive syndication. Or Facebook group posts and Google Reader shares. As to the business model, well, that one’s in flux. Right now, advertising of free media is the work-around. No amount of threatening Jobs, or anybody else in the communications industrial complex will change the dynamic: if you have something people want, they’ll pay for it. With their time. It’s attention, baby, and don’t believe anybody who’s figured out how to get it reliably. Remember the guy following the elephant with a shovel: “What, and give up show business?”

Now let’s look at lightning striking twice. It’s 1968 folks, and it’s a jump ball. In ‘68, Johnson quit when McCarthy lost by only 10 or so points in New Hampshire. Bobby Kennedy came in, caught McCarthy, and passed him on the last night of his life to secure Mayor Daley’s support at the convention. The fuel: a vicious, spirit-draining war, a Golden Age of music colliding with the first cartel, and Bobby’s ability to hold together the fractious racial war in the summer of hate.

And then there were the drugs. Today the drugs are legal, high blood pressure and cholesterol medications, enteric aspirin, Starbucks sugar-free vanilla no-fat decaf lattes, and green tea with ginseng. But the highs come from social media. That’s all I’m saying folks. My wife just came out of the office saying, “I’ve got 31 friends and that’s it.” Sure. I can quit anytime I want to. I just don’t want to.

You can do the spreadsheet to map ‘68 to ‘07. My bet is Edwards is McCarthy, Hillary is Hubert Humphrey, and Obama is Bobby. Sure, I’m wrong. Office ain’t dead, and the iPhone hasn’t changed everything. But it’s all over on February 5th, and Democrats will have to calculate whether the electorate will vote for a polarizing Hillary or any of the mediocre alternatives. Giuliani did clean up Times Square, and it stuck. Do we want four years of HillaryGate or Fred Thompson and benign vacation neglect? McCain is a good man with the wrong mindset for ‘68; remember that Nixon won with his secret plan to end the war. And Mitt, well the closest Rockefeller ever got to the Oval Office was over Agnew’s nolo contendre.

The music? I’m not a big Springsteen fan, but his intro to Living in the Future on the Today Show had to have had the NBC brass squirming over their FCC license. When the blue collar meets the left in Rockefeller Plaza, it’s good to remember that John Lennon got John Sinclair sprung in 3 days from hard time and all he was saying was give peace a chance. In retrospect, Mitchell and Haldeman were not so far off in worrying about John and Yoko. At the time, I thought Sometime in New York City was Lennon’s weakest album and the only one I never bought–but Nixon realized that if the class clown gets away with throwing spitballs at the substitute teacher, the next thing is soldiers refusing to fight for oil.

The iPhone War is a war against the effective. “Breaking rational customer rights,” as my brother call it, ignores the customer rights I’ve received as a result of Jobs’ nuanced bear hug of one of the cartel’s leading players. Before the iPhone, there was zero ability to commandeer WiFi on my phone; spare me that there were small niche players who might have delivered some of that capability along with no reasonable browser, no integration with email links, no any of the other UI breakthroughs like touchscreen and photo email. Today AT&T’s 2.5G network serves ably as a stub between WiFi servers in the office, home, hotel, and recording studio. Seamless. Oh, yes, that feels better. Oh, I like this store because they bundle WiFi for the million iPhone users who value instant and constant access to information.

Then there’s Twitter, where I see Scoble complaining because the auto-complete mangled a message. Oh well, we understood, and still appreciated him cradling Milan while keeping in the game on his iPhone. Facebook is exposing more and more of its network to the platform, as is Google and those willing to put up with some of the limitations of the license. Because that’s what we are living in the future on: a license negotiated with one of the carriers, the RIAA and MPAA cartels, and some but not all of the networks. Track back from the roadblocks on the device and you arrive at a bunch of police cruisers with lights flashing, protecting the old business models. Yeah, as Scott McNeally said about privacy: “Get over it.”

Right now the blockages remaining are

WiFi synch
Flash/Java
local store

What we want WiFi synching for is the free podcast layer. Right now, it’s vendor-subsidized, first by Starbucks, then by network week-free promotions, and soon by bundled aggregation plays. NBC is playing time-shift games with its cable networks while on iTunes strike, so however long it takes for us to get sick of Journeyman and Chuck and Bionic Woman is how long it will take for the Peacock network to fold its feathers and slink back to the WiFi store. By then, Jobs will have relaxed the WiFi blockade to include TV and not just music, or maybe he’ll just use podcasts to force NBC back.

Flash and Java are Jobs’ other tool for compliance. No way in hell Java comes in while Apple holds the hammer with the cartel. Java on the iPhone lets RIM and Verizon and the rest of the cartel catch up on features while destroying Apple’s iTunes lock that drives AT&T’s acquiescence. Flash is already running in effect courtesy of the YouTube toehold, but here again Flash, like Java, is a platform leveler that shifts power away from the iTunes velvet fist to a flaccid commons where mediocrity achieves the clout to stand still.

The local store appears to be the home for copy/paste and the rest of the computer functionality not yet delivered on the device. But in fact Office is dead, caching is the true disruptor, and the cloud is the local store we’re waiting for when it’s already standing there right behind us. Predictive caching based on gestural APIs eliminates the need for copying on the client. If Facebook sets up both sides of the conversation like some dynamic RSS/SIP/gcal mashup, we can let our profiles do the by-reference parsing.

Jobs understands that the winners of this market conversation are the inheritors of the implications of the architecture. If he can maintain control of the hammer while moving steadily forward via on-demand updates, we will stick with him. If we stick with him, the cartels will have to fall back in line. Just a theory.

It’s Day Three here in New York. My friend David Sanborn is working with producer Phil Ramone in one of if not the largest room in the City. The discussion of the moment is around whether to go in and replace or just cut another version. Seems to be leaning toward a new one.

The sound is a mix of big band and the kind of feel of the early Sanborn days when many babies were made (paraphrasing the chatter in the room on several ballads.) But the description does the thing no justice; this is something old and new at the same time. There’s a kind of methodical approach to a question that hasn’t been asked.

Ramone is a sly, gently funny general with more credits than a Hollywood blockbuster — Google it for details. At one point yesterday drummer Steve Gadd suggested a new approach on a ballad, where as best I can remember it, he suggested they let the tune play them rather than the other way around. The idea worked, but the result was a track that suddenly sounded like a Phil Ramone record. Go figure; Ramone’s style is velvet hammer, seemingly relaxed and flexible with no room for bullshit at the execution level.

Now the Marcus Miller tune Brother Ray is on Take Two, not counting a rehearsal recorded as per standing instructions. There’s been some time eaten up chasing a click track from an earlier version done at Sanborn’s home studio. The business of recording doesn’t add up much these days, but as with the technology game, something will emerge.

Ramone just threatened to wait until the last day of the sessions and then spring a marathon run-down-all-eight-tracks on the band. “There’s no cure for cancer here. Now that we’ve got it all in the can, let’s do some real shit.” He’s joking but seriously.

Food breaks and playbacks typically dissolve into escalatingly dirty jokes. The horn leader is Lou Marini of Blues Brothers fame and a music camp buddy of Sanborns as a child. None of his stories are repeatable.

Some quick thoughts after a quick scan of shared feeds from a studio in New York:

NBC’s decision to dump iTunes will have the same success Times Select did, by proving that fighting RSS is like quitting caffeine. The headache goes away when you go back to doing what you did before you stopped doing it. DRM for a week on Windows is a massive commercial for anything but.

The iPhone has effectively replaced my laptop for much of my working day. The extent to which I can create the necessary metadata to do my various jobs determines what applications I use.

I’ve noticed the business value of emergent projects has a direct correlation to the simplicity and balance of the contract between sharing parties. It’s not the open source model of recent history but rather an evolution where age and passion intersect. I’m seeing so much of what I’ve worked toward from 30 years and 30 months ago intersect in recent weeks, and am finding it surprising how few historical comparables of this renaissance come immediately to mind. It’s a heady confluence of patience, resolve, and roadwork. Humor has its usual role, but not so much a catalyst as a grace note in the foundation of the work.

The notion that music means less than it once did is laughably false. Something has changed, yes, and what’s even funnier is how quickly it can change back.

Those of you interested in participating in a short private beta please send me a message on Facebook and I’ll be in touch.

I’m at Sun today for a Jonathan Schwartz keynote and panels on the emerging opportunity of the BRIC — Brazil, Russia, India, China — markets. Schwartz seems to have hit a stride of sorts where his rhetoric of the last few years has been caught up to by the results in the marketplace. Certainly vigorous layoffs and belt-tightening have had their effect, but also aggressive R&D as in research and delivery of the new chipset and a big downpayment on virtualization have resulted in a good quarter.

Today Jonathan’s thesis is that technology eliminates barriers. The delveloping markets represent the largest growing but smaller sized segment of Sun’s opportunity. That’s trillions in the US versus billions in the emerging nations. Schwartz sees the US as in danger of limiting the spread of our technologies. Talent, he says, is flowing away from Silicon Valley as a result of restrictions. At the same time, the panel talks of “the next Google” as coming from a Brazil or elsewhere. And as always, Schwartz is on the defensive about how to detect actual progress in revenue.

Market share revenue will be a derivative of market share adoption, he says. “But it happens over time.” He suggests comparing Red Hat and JBoss growth over time. Free software, open sourced Java, focus on mobile handsets. Afterwards, I asked Jonathan how he accounts for revenue for the virtualization layer; he suggested the wrapper — Thumper — encapsulating the value of Solaris and attendant technologies. I invited him to come on the next Bad Sinatra Live and he said, “send me a note.” Here it is.

I’m going to resume the conversation that used to be called The Gillmor Gang in the next few weeks. The Bad Sinatra Live session we did at Gnomedex was an experiment to see whether the old dynamics were still there and still valuable to those who have regretted my decision to shut the old show down. I’m waiting on the footage shot there to see if it can work as a Bad Sinatra, either in combination with other footage or standalone. But in any case there were enough interesting moments to answer my questions.

It’s not clear whether I can count on the participation of everybody in the same way or on the same day for that matter. Arrington and Calacanis seem busy with their conference and business models, Udell remains uninterested in the soap opera, Doc is moving his family to Harvard Square, and in general things seem to be entering a more professional phase. But I remain convinced that the quality of the dialogue among all of us is not being served by remaining on the sidelines, and I’m ready to fix that problem.

To be clear, this will not be a resumption of The Gillmor Gang; the reasons the show was stopped remain in force. But fundamentally The Gang was a representation of a conversation I’ve been a part of for years and one that continues as we speak. I like the reaction to Bad Sinatra — the same people who loved the Gang like the new show, and the rest, well, they can just keep moving. The issues that permeated the Gang also remain, but the economics of the time seem to have erased a lot of the dynamic tension that used to resonate between Vizard and Farber, between Hugh and Doc, between Arrington and Nick Carr, between Jason and… Jason. That was one big reason the Gang went dark; everybody stopped laughing about Office being dead because it became so obvious even Scoble had to admit it. I kid because somebody has to do it.

In Seattle, I invited David Ossman of The Firesign Theatre to join us for Bad Sinatra Live, and he gave the right answer: “Why not!” For both of us, there was strong resonance of the time in 1972 when we filmed the group in a live performance at KPFK in Los Angeles, the convention of the National Surrealist Light People’s Party, you know, the one where we nominated George Papoon running on his campaign platform: Not Insane! It was no coincidence that John Lennon wore the campaign button that year as he fought off John Mitchell and the Watergate crowd; this time we’re faced with a front-loaded campaign where the shouting will be over on the first Tuesday in February. Where The Beatles were the thought leaders then, today it is Jobs and Google and the iPhone/on demand/Facebook nexus that’s in charge.

Only a few recognized Ossman in Seattle, including one guy who was at the filming of the Martian Space Party 35 years before. But those who did recognized that this is a political campaign we’re in, and there’s no time to lose in getting the themes in place. The candidates: Winer, Canter, Scoble, Calacanis, Fitzpatrick — each addressed the convention, and irregardless of the drama, each locked in a certain number of delegates. Remember: someone will win this election day (2.5.08), in at least two parties. And I bet we’ll intuitively know who the winner in November will be that day as well.

At the end of the Bad Sinatra Live session, I signed off with the some familiar words: “See you again next time on another edition of The Gillmor Gang…” The folks in the room were paying attention; there was a quick intake of breath and then a laugh. They were right: it wasn’t a mistake, it was a joke.

Before Gnomedex 4 I had grown vaguely aware of Chris Pirillo. Not being a TechTV viewer (hadn’t moved to a cable system running it) I was unaware of Chris’s community, though this Iowa get-together was slowly penetrating the outer layers of the blogosphere and the tech media worlds I try and monitor. Then Gnomedex moved to Lake Tahoe and then its present home in Seattle. Now it’s Gnomedex 7, and Pirillo is blowing it all up.

“There is no theme.” Chris says from the stage as he opens this year’s conference. Not true. The theme is how to make a difference. A good question from an intuitive guy who I count on not getting, so that I can learn and wake up and get over myself and the map of the world that I project all my distortions and fears through.

The opening keynote is an old-fashioned barnburner by a self-described spy named Robert David Steele. As one who believed David Lifton when he said Kennedy’s brain was missing, I enjoyed the harrangue, a melange of Tim Leary meets Gordon Liddy as told by Olivers Stone and Hardy. He stayed mostly away from my favorite tarpits, opting instead for what he summarized as “Your government is stupid.” He wants a Cisco router that provides a rules-based approach to who sees information about himself. I question his anointing Cisco, but the idea is right. “If Cisco won’t make them, make it yourself.”

Steele thinks last year’s crew was unimpressive, inconsequential people or A-Listers on the way down (my paraphrase.) He challenges us to harvest the so-called citizen journalism revolution and cuts off conversation about common wisdom arguments about Internet radio, but undercuts his credibility with sweeping kickers like “Once one state gets it, the rest will quickly follow.” A marine’s explanation of life. Pirillo’s reboot is underway.

It’s not the Gillmor Gang, but what is.

Copyright 2007 Bad Sinatra Network LLC

Jason Calacanis, Bill Atkinson, Mike Arrington, Dan Farber, Mark Benioff, Rudy Giuliani and Steve Gillmor

iPhone download

I’ll have the AppleTV version up on BadSinatra.com in a bit.

iPhone download

A few weeks ago I wrote a post called iPhonomics. A few days later I was chatting with Andrew Keen when he casually mentioned that would make a good title for a book. Although I have no intention of writing a book (that’s real work) I thought I’d check out the domain on Go Daddy. To my not so much surprise, someone had grabbed it. I called the guy up and asked him why. He said he thought it was a good title for a book. I asked him if he would release it back to me. He said he’d think about it and call me on Monday. He never did.

Several years ago at BloggerCon (the one where Adam Curry talked and Scoble did a session on information overload) I coined the term podosphere in answer to a question. As I spoke, a guy two rows down and 10 seats over grabbed the domain. A year or so later he sold the domain to someone else, who contacted me and asked whether I was interested in working with him to do something with it. I declined.

Several months ago Doc Searls and I came up with a name for a new show I have been developing. I grabbed it that night as soon as I got home. Tomorrow that show will launch: it’s called Bad Sinatra.

In the Gesturesphere, we all make contributions to the state of mind we call this social network of ours. You can call it attention, or intention, or VRM, or Twitter, or whatever. But it still represents our hope to make some difference, to leave a footprint in the cement out in front of the theatre of our lives. We take it a lot more seriously than we let on, but like high school we pretend that it doesn’t hurt when we’re insulted, passed by, snickered at, or worst of all, not noticed.

Gestures have become big business. The politics of personality swamp us with messages that need to be triaged much like we used to parse advertising. Is this the program wrapped in signals or signals disguised as programming? Yes. It’s an ugly space we’re in, and nobody holds the high ground. We’re all selling something, and of course it’s ourselves.

Gabe Rivera invited me into Facebook to show me the news feature and the general ecology of the system. I appreciate the gesture. As part of the setup, I gave FB access to my Gmail contact list and it converted the entire list into friend requests (with my permission of course.) At first I went name by name and deselected the ones I felt awkward about, but at the end I said the hell with it and just sent them all out. I’m glad I did. I have Twitter to thank for this, and before that LinkedIn, where the difficulty of delineating “friendship” gave way to simply saying yes to all. Come to think of it, if the contact is made, it represents a gesture of friendship at its heart, no matter what the cascading motive beyond it.

Once you’re over the initial phase, Facebook begins to tease out more metadata, the context of the relationship and then the fleshing out of the category with detail. I’m still resistant to the early attempts at coaxing content — write something on my wall and this zombies thing, for example — but the system’s mechanism to clarify such choices as “You met randomly” produces results like this:

Gillmor is my favorite “asshole” and I mean that as the highest praise. I heard a rumor that he’s starting a new podcast with Doc. I pray this is true. A real man with a real voice in a sea of ridiculous poseurs. I would listen to him everyday if I could. He’s funny And mean. I like him.

Fantastic. And then I get a request to confirm this comment as accurate. You bet I did. The joy of collaborating with a robot to produce fine comedy is exhilarating. And to Tree Shapiro, the author of above, thank you sir for your discerning genius and fuck you as well. See you in the Gesturesphere.

I’ve been stealing cycles throughout the weekend to read Andrew Keen’s much-loathed book in preparation for a 4- or 5-way deathmatch this Tuesday at 7:30 in Campbell California. The venue is a Baskin and Robbins — no, a Barnes & Noble, and the players are Andrew, Nick Carr, Keith Teare, and me, moderated by Dan Farber. I’ll reserve my comments for edgewise insertion on Tuesday, but so far I’ve been surprised at both the dismay on the part of A-Listers and the effectiveness Keen has shown at dragooning people such as my brother, Doc Searls, and Jeff Jarvis into promoting the work into the mainstream conversation.

I can understand my brother’s dismay at being simultaneously bludgeoned for championing citjournism and unfairly lumped in with Keen’s indictment of amateurs in the journalism space. In fact, my brother’s lending of his mainstream journalism credibility to the blog space early and then fulltime was one of the first and most significant validators of new media credibility. But I guess he can’t say that himself without appearing petty and self-promoting, so I’ll say it for him. Those of you who know both of us know that while I often find myself looking at Dan’s issues from another perspective, nobody can touch him as an ethical source of how to do what he does (journalism) right across the alleged divide between old and new medias. Keen loses points there that he will need to make up moving forward.

But Dan’s refusal to be engaged in the continued discussion falls flat with me, as it does when Doc demurs as well. Just as it doesn’t follow (in Keen’s work) that because mainstream media is finding it hard to survive on the realtime network, that the flood of amateurs from below is responsible, it also doesn’t follow that the wisdom of the crowd is enough to replace the inefficient media or that the frictionless voice of the Wordpress onramp has no conflict of interest of its own.

Keen is finding this odyssey something of a Nixon goes to China moment, where his more authentic exploration of the weaknesses of both sides on his road show is preparing the way for a real dialogue minus the posturing on each end. Tom Foremski’s emotional post about the Chronicle layoffs is one signpost along this more profitable road, and those who duck the old debate should only feel comfortable if they join a more productive “now-what” discussion on the other side of the mirror Keen suggests we are holding up to ourselves. Frankly, I’m sick of the debate, but if that’s what it takes to get to the real work ahead, so be it.

Mike Arrington is tall. He’s also devious and complex. Today he called me a journalist as he blithely ripped off my hilarious “but what has that got to do with the iPhone” mantra. That TechCrunch page view laundering operation is some kinda smooth deal. In goes the smoldering work of a lifetime of bullshit detection, and out comes another good day at the click farm.

Last night Mike wrote up the rumored Google/Salesforce deal, and amid the correct assumptions about the announcement he threw up the notion that Google Gears might be part of the deal. Smart thinking on Mr. Mike’s part, but with the 9PM embargo lifted on the actual details it’s clear that Gears has nothing to do with it.

All I can say, is “what exactly does that have to do with the iPhone?” Everything.

Mike’s comments get right to the heart of the matter: battery life. In a world post-iPhone where everything changes, battery life becomes the arbiter of usage. iPhonomics becomes the process of reducing battery usage to acceptable fill-ups at power oases throughout the daily lifecycle of the device. Let’s say the phone gets 20% of usage during the day and evening if out and about. That leaves 30% for Web and the rest for iPod, of which 40% might be audio and 60% video.

Plane usage tips toward iPod. Here’s where Gears comes in, as Google Apps suck up most of the airtime and you can charge the iPhone while you browse offline. At home, Apple TV shifts away from iPhone video in a similar complementary fashion. Soon it’s bedtime, and tomorrow the cycle begins anew.

Is iPhone a Blackberry killer? Yes. Most of the time now, I lug my Mac around with me in suspend mode, never taking it out except to tank up on AppleTV (and soon iPhone subs.) Gears means inevitably that text and soon images will be cached across the surface area of my environment: laptop, AppleTV, iPhone.

Recently I missed a two part Grey’s Anatomy that my wife had seen half of while I was traveling back from NY. (JetBlue doesn’t carry ABC, just the other three.) Somehow the DVR was erased. I downloaded it from iTunes and forgot about it. If the next two disappear, I’ll do the same thing.

Blackberry = DVR. Will AppleTV kill Dish Network? Yes. I’ll upgrade to HD any day now, not caring that the DVR will go from 100 to 30 hours. The secret of the iPhone is that Gears and Dish and Google Reader, Docs, and Gmail and AppleTV are all peripherals for the iPhone. iPhone therefore I am.

I always thought the day would come where I finally had enough bullshit from the various companies trying to game the attention model. This afternoon I had a long (2.5) hour chat with Loren Feldman. As some of you may have noticed, Loren is not a big fan of the non-profit AttentionTrust, which he called a joke in a recent video post. In the chat today, I found some common ground around the notion that even though the Trust was in Loren’s opinion hopelessly conflicted by co-founder Seth Goldstein’s participation in a number of attention startups, the basic idea of attention was in fact a powerful trigger for what I believe is the successor to the page view model.

What’s wrong with the page view model, you might ask? Nothing, if you have unlimited time for cruising the Net for actionable information. Attention for me has never been about getting attention, selling attention, or any of the Attention Economy constructs put forth by Goldstein, Goldhaber, Dyson, O’Reilly, and others. The last two years of conferences on the subject have provided precisely nothing of interest for me beyond my original impulse: harnessing the power of each person’s “karass” to reduce noise and prioritize information beyond the algorithms of page rank, techmeme, and RSS rivers or mail UI interfaces.

That was, and is, the goal of my work in this arena. Getting there brings politics into play, and here I’ve tried to emulate the strategies and innovative obstinacy of Dave Winer as practiced in the RSS wars. Attention.xml, the Attention Recorder, GestureBank — each phase of this campaign has been designed and supported by me only as a vehicle for abstracting out the notion that users can, and will, take charge of their implicit behavior, or gestures as I mandate them. As Loren says in today’s chat, the signals of an endowed and hand-raising few are inherently more interesting to me (us) than the mass culture of enticed reactors.

At Rafat Ali and Staci D. Kramer’s recent conference, I met and sat next to Jason Calacanis’ Weblogs-Inc. partner Brian Alvey. At dinner one night he told me about a SXSW panel he attended that dealt with a mashup of attention and identity themes. From his description of the event and a little research, I deduced that the thorough summary of my thinking on gestures was delivered by AttentionTrust board member Mary Hodder.

A few days ago Brian sent me a pointer to a New York Times article on identity that quoted Kaliya Hamlin sounding a similar note. These two datapoints, plus a long conversation I had with Kim Cameron at the last Internet Identity Workshop (and a follow-up this week), convince me that we have internalized sufficiently the fundamentals of what I find compelling about attention. Brian wonders why I am not cited in these discussions; I wonder why it took me so long to get over the embarrassment of being shunted aside and get back on track.

Rather than pointing out the deficiencies of the various attention startups surfacing these days, here is the lens through which I view the credibility from a user-in-charge perspective:

• Who owns the data?
• How is the data distributed should the service-offering owner be bought?
• Is data being collected in return for one service and distributed for another?
• Can data be resold or laundered to remove user control over distribution?

I’m sure there are more granular delineations of data flow, but in practice I can usually spot questionable terms of service in About statements or privacy policies from these bullet points. I don’t mean to suggest that these are legal violations, as most attention services make reasonably clear what you get as service in return for harvesting your data. Much of this is common sense: you sign up for Gmail, you understand you’re getting a so-called free service in return for sharing your behavior with Google. Twitter: a soapbox for a social media map of your cosmos.

But I’m less concerned with the legal trail of these clicks than the utility moving forward of the accumulating data and what directional data it holds within its social map. In the wake of the collapse of the operating/Office system, I am looking for the network effects that derive from orchestrating attention signals to accelerate discovery, incent affinity-derived content creation, and indemnify contributed data from pollution by laundering and then merging with formerly clean user-managed data. Whether the attention service has a legal responsibility to handle collected data with the user’s interest in mind is not crucial; how the attention service appears credible to users is.

Put simply, GestureBank was conceived and implemented as a mechanism to insure initial and continued contribution of anonymous data to a user-controlled aggregated pool. Such a data pool survives the most rigorous tests of data flow and integrity. Data queries and services produced by affinity services aligned with GestureBank must not be corrupted by co-mingling with less rigorous attention collection strategies.

To mandate this “clean” requirement, GestureBank will release a GBX2 Firefox add-in that adds header data to each request (click) that specifies the user’s issuance of a specific license to receivers of that request, allowing use of that data as long as the principles of user control remain in effect. To reiterate, this is not a legal requirement, although it may ultimately pass that test, but a direct communication of the user’s intent and a lens through which the user subsequently can view the credibility and integrity of entities who seek to use that data subsequently.

With this stamp of user-control in place, I can now go back to working with like-minded affinity groups without concerning myself with conflicts of interest or attacks from those who would obfuscate the attention opportunity with complexity. If you do your own homework and examine attention service offerings, you can quickly assess the validity of the user contract. Then it is up to you to decide how, or if, to trust the integrity of the service and its shared data.

If GBX2 is in the chain, you can then go to the successors and query them as to how they support the terms of the user license. If they ignore the data, that presents an opportunity to ask why? If they refuse to provide their services to GBX2 users, that speaks even louder. Conversely, those services who respect the user license will be rewarded in turn.

Today the Web woke up to a real story about itself. Microsoft has put forward a powerful challenge to the notion that Google will steamroller Windows once it’s done with Office. Scott Guthrie made a strong case for developer extension of the rich browser, and Ray Ozzie cracked open the tiniest ray of hope that Office apps could conspire with Silverlight to create lock-in around the new Web runtime.

In the absence of competition, this could have been a frightening moment for those who dread a return to Redmond control. The short-term losers are Sun (the Java runtime, hello) and perhaps Adobe on the tools side. The mid-term threatened certainly include Apple and Salesforce, where their versions of rich and reach depend on a level browser playing field. What happens if we start lusting for that extra oomph of a Silverlight UI on a video-based information service we’ve somehow gotten addicted to?

I’m not so much concerned about the Windows experience; it’s the Mac runtime that really tunnels in, and the forthcoming Ruby on Rails support in the DLR, that bring the aggressive Charles Fitzgerald out to tell Farber why this one is inevitable once more. After all, as Ozzie implied in the Q&A with Arrington, what’s the competition? Twitter?

The engineering behind this is stunning. This is no Hailstorm, no crash dive all-hands-on-deck save the cheerleader, save the company drive from the Gates playbook. This is a Microsoft 3.0 iteration, with Visual Studio and Firefox tied at the waist. This is both the good news and the bad news, for either the Web or Microsoft but one not the other. In this new alignment, Google has to make a decision quickly–to release the Firefox persistence engine now. Ballmer’s dismissal of Google Apps is the one shrill note in this broad masterstroke of a rollout:

A: They’ve come out with what I might call — what’s the politically correct way of saying it? — they’ve come out with some of the lowest functionality, lowest capability applications of all time. (Laughter.)

I’m not one to remotely dismiss Ballmer, but he’s speaking into my wheelhouse and missing the big boat. I just upgraded to Firefox 2.0 after months of biding; all of a sudden spellcheck is working inside Wordpress without a plug-in. When I reboot unexpectedly, my tabs are auto-restored; when I click to close each individual tab, the focus shifts back to the tab that launched the new page (Google Reader impact.) On a day when I can see wanting some of this Microsoft technology, small iterative improvements remind me of the inexorable lock-in ahead.

Ray Ozzie is right when he says they’re milling the code. Scott Guthrie stood out almost five years ago in an off-the-record retreat led by Eric Rudder where he rolled out the ASP.Net code. Today he, not Ray, recalled Bill’s mastery of the strategy at as many levels deep as we wanted to check. The old Microsoft is back, but now the question Ray and his team has to answer is what is the metric for success.

Google’s strength is as much a reminder of how not to get sucked back into the panacea of the “rich” internet experience as anything else. Until today, I hadn’t seen anything close to the old feeling Microsoft engendered: the willingness to do what it took to establish a fair price for dominance. Google now has that role, with its simple metric of user time, and I for one will not surrender it lightly. Instead, I will look for the opening the Firefox team took in jujitsuing the IE platform, that Flash leveraged in kicking video into gear, that Apple is doing with Apple TV.

Again, Ballmer is dismissive of Apple’s small market share, not recognizing the palpable sense of fiduciary responsibility to stick with the Mac as a measure of safety against the tyranny of ubiquity. I’ve for so long been the guy on the other side of the question, dismissive of OpenOffice, of Zune, of even the BlackBerry in the face of iPhone. This is not about teams, or stars, or power; it’s about the experience of feeling light on the feet as an attribute of success. It’s the comforting knowledge of being wrong: about open source, about Jason Calacanis, about a host of things I still don’t want to admit but will. But it’s also about the calm fusion of building on those insights, the layering of one world view over the next with its subtle signposts.

Tonight on Heroes we watched an alternate reality not unlike the one we saw performed at Mix. I don’t mean to suggest there are good guys and bad guys here, the tipping point, blah blah blah. No, these people are all heroes; Ray with his nervous manner trying to sell us on the logic of the big plus sign while Scoble and Winer Twitter on nearby. The sync on the Mac slowed to a crawl and I had to reattach for the Q&A, a perfect reminder of the downlevel experience I have in store on the new Web. The Ustream feed was sound-dead, but I still got the drift, enough to hear Udell in the background so I could call him and plum the latency and yet indomitable spirit of my platform.

Yes, I’ll look forward to hearing what Brendan Eich thinks about this challenge, how Udell will keep his integrity and lend Microsoft some of it in the process, how everybody will get their game on as they — all of them — will rise to the occasion and bring these two Webs together.

In the opening panel at Rafat Ali and Staci Kramer’s EconSM, some flavor:

• Tariq Krim of NetVibes–advertising to an audience is being or about to be replaced by attention mining.
• Some guy named Jason who apparently failed to buy MySpace–The future of media is not about telling but creating a platform for users to tell.
• Richard Rosenblatt, who sold MySpace (early?)–If you do believe the user controls his or her own media, you must give them that control.
• Tariq–With widgets, interaction with a service is much more valuable.
• Questioner–Is there too much expectation built into social media?
• Rosenblatt–Many of our sites, we haven’t actually added social media yet; last week, to test 35,000 microcommunities. Traffic grew 15% in a week.

Blessedly free of helmetCam agendas, Nick Carr/Andrew Keen meme-baiting, flogojournalism dithering. So far so good.

Harriet is Mark Cuban. Mark (stood next to him but never talked to him) is out with his latest swipe at Web 2.0, that HDTV is where the action is. Harriet thinks Apple TV is a day late and a dollar short.

I am one of the people Mark says is eyeing HDTV. I’m looking because my Apple TV has HDMI output and I have an HDMI cable that doesn’t connect to anything. Mark is right: I will buy a new HDTV this year, and probably every year or two from here on out. Mark says the Internet is dead. I hope Mark keeps saying that. I’d be interested in hearing his talk at TechBrunch 20 but I doubt I’ll be able to get in given the blogger-of-note line ahead of me.

Ozzie is Ray Ozzie. I tried to sneak in to Mix07 at the least second to see Ray talk about whatever Microsoft can do right now to block somebody (Adobe? Amazon? certainly not Google) but they’re turning A-Listers away before they ignore me. I actually think Microsoft has turned a corner, but the body is still jerking from the old head being removed and I trust Wagged keeps ignoring me for a little while longer.

I listened to Doc Searls on Adam Curry’s show last night, a discussion of webradio and the cartel’s move to crush net radio. If Harriet is right, why bother worrying about it. Curry announced the end of the Sirius satellite relationship, coming some ten months after The Gillmor Gang was taken off Sirius. Bob Dylan remains aboard XM, renewing for a second year. And Dylan is quoted as wishing Paul McCartney would quit making music because he’s so good at it and not letting new talent emerge. Me, I’m looking forward to his first record on Starbucks next month.

So there you have it: Ozzie and Harriet control the waves, one calling PCs dead and the other Live. Scoble’s in the hallway, Arrington on stage, Calacanis and Winer insisting on email. I’m just sitting here challenging all the nodes to raise their hand and tell me where to go. This week, Staci says I’m in, so does Kevin SuperNova. And as we speak, iTunes is filling my Apple TV up with…. Stay tuned.

I just wrote the most fantastic post in the press room at Web 2.0 Expo, and then lost it when Wordpress declined to auto-save. Yes, I know, Web 2.0 sucks, Office is not dead, blah blah blah. No matter, being brilliant is not part of my new business model. Instead, I’m all about the Law of small numbers.

You know the Law of Large numbers, of course; that’s the one where Microsoft reached such a large number that its continued growth percentage-wise collapsed. Some are now predicting that with Google. They are wrong. Google will just keep on going, because Google is in control of the exchange rate. Remember when Nixon took us off the gold standard? There is no new Dylan, or Nixon neither.

Web 2.0 Expo rocks. The Expo floor is full of actual real vendors, second and third-stage guys with actual business models, enterprisey, light on the mashup stuff, a dash of RSS wrappers around blocking and tackling, and the smell of happy vendors who for once have gotten a reasonable sample to chew over for the next few months. The sessions? The keynotes? I’ve opted for the press room and hallway conversations. Scoble has the hallway take-down mastered, pumping out Justin2.0 to the Twitterati. Mike Arrington has some new conference with Jason Calacanis called TechLunch 20. Mike begged me for a link. No problem; I’m all about links.

Now we’re sitting around the press room as Mike tries to follow up his eBay StumbleUpon scoop with a Google clone. Mike calls me a one trick pony as I persist in calling Google the only winner from here on out. But the truth is that the Goggle-is-dead antitrust dance is oversubscribed and stillborn. In his keynote, Schmidt pointed out that Google controlled just 1% of the advertising market. Maybe, but what 1%? This is the Law of small numbers at work.

Conferences are about expectation management. I expected nothing from the keynotes or sessions here, and wasn’t disappointed. Good people were booked, but really, what possible information could come from Jeff Bezos’ rehash of the same conversation he’s had for the last two years. Partly that’s due to his being way ahead of the curve with S3 et al, and the rest is due to the impedance mismatch of a developer-heavy focus for a blue collar audience. Or Eric Schmidt denying the war with Office within sentences of his announcement of a PowerPoint killer.

Here’s how this works: Google Office team’s metric for success is amount of time within the app base. Inside Google, where Docs and Spreadsheet, Gmail, and Calendar are deployed, percentage of total time in the apps approaches 100%. Sure, some of the beancounters use Excel. The Google guy in Dan Farber’s keynote panel admitted he occasionally uses Word, though who knows why? I asked Arrington what percentage he thought of corporate email users have private Gmail accounts. “Broken record, dude, we know your position.” In other words, right.

Meanwhile I ran into a friend from the Attention days who’s moved from Microsoft to an Office startup-killer. He invented a key component of what’s going to be announced at Mix. Why leave? WHich 1% are we talking about. If Google keeps winning, what’s left for the rest of us. Either Google does an IBM Global Services and just hires everybody on the planet, thereby forcing user time in Google Office (pronounced OS) up to 100%, or they come to the brands and partner. Who are the brands? 1%?

So it’s Vaudeville 2.0 then. We’re talking small numbers with large impact. Soon I’ll be starting a new show; I was shooting some of it yesterday at Moscone West. When it goes live I’ll be looking for a small number of people who are willing to trust me — full stop. You know me: I’ve been dumping virtually every thought in my head on the network for a long time (here, AttentionTrust, Gillmor Gang) and I believe there’s enough data out there to make up your mind about me. I’ve talked to 3 people about this Law of small numbers so far, and they’re all onboard. I’ll let you know soon how you can help if you’re interested.

Google is not to be feared. Google is big, but so are you in the World According to You. My only (and continued) interest in attention was to harness what Phil Ochs called the small circle of friends. At Web 2.0 Expo this week I spent some time with Dave Winer and John Dvorak. I’ve often joked about John as a proof point in the dynamics of negative gestures. As in, if John thinks it’s good, I’ll bet the other way. In the marketplace of information triage, what you don’t care about is the key to opening the window of time to what you do care about. But now I’ve gotten a more nuanced perspective with John; he laughingly agrees that he actually does believe someof the bait that he throws out for debate. Which some is the key.

The power of which 1% is what I’m interested in. The power of Web 2.0 Expo wasn’t the hallway or the planned sessions — it was the look in the eyes of vendors on the show room floor sizing up their friends. It felt like a little Comdex/CES mashup, big enough to make the numbers work, but small enough to get your arms around what real work is being done with these web technologies. This network thing is counter-intuitive in a powerful way. Lock-in strategies are broken. Look at Ajax, designed as a way for Microsoft to protect Outlook and Office from the Web. Outlook Web Access was crippled at the read/write barrier, but ended up combined with Hailstorm to produce Gmail and Google Office.

Google’s lock-in is based on the user voting with their feet. As long as Google delcares themselves for the user in charge, they will continue to earn my trust. There are a lot of people like me. Or at least a large small number.

InfoWorld timeline from the last print edition.

Back from drinks with Jason. I’m staying in a hotel overlooking 405, the traffic light at 60 mph in both directions. LA is somehow feeling more like the 70’s now than in decades. I hated the 70’s at the time; a rough mix of post-Beatle depression and chalky outlines around the body that was the revolution. Thank god the revolution was over, but thirty years to wait for the wisdom that comes from enough mistakes to convince you of your own mortality.

Being mortal, once the stuff of paperbacks and gas wars, now the smell of fresh warm air on Santa Monica Boulevard. At the conference yesterday, sitting in the courtyard with Phil Windley, the mood was light, business friendly, cordial. The tremors of the Valley shakeout tucked comfortably away for the moment, the talk turned to the public service community, frozen in time like some mastadon on ice. Back in the Executive briefing, the Wall Streeters poured over the data, carrying payloads from tunnel to tunnel in some version of ant farm optimization. No pressure, though, the pleasant pitter pat of casual visualization.

The 70’s. Is it possible I can embrace them after all this time? Seems like a few seconds, really, the thunder of the stallions receding into the canyons, the terrible dullness of the absence of inspiration. Oh was I so wrong then, and now? Wrong to decry the trip down from the hilltop, wrong to miss the moments of competence and calm, wrong to mask sorrow in anger.

But that is done, and today is new, not reborn but born anew. The rush of metal on 405 below is steady, a friend you can count on, not anticipated but surely there all the same. The sweet sorrow of children, tucked in their dreams for the night. The balance so srtuggled for, sitting there with a sly grin waiting to surprise you. Hello good friend.

Today is a good day. An LA day. The actors stretch their limbs and pause to savor the frame. No matter where the camera is, the music spreads out across the scene. Never did I hear this before, but it was there then as it is now. As Red Barber used to say, “How about that.”

I’m in San Diego at the O’Reilly Etech conference, in the Executive Briefing track. Seth Goldstein is about to demo his latest attention project, AttenTV. Out on the Net, the shuttering of InfoWorld leads TechMeme. Thanks to Matt McAlister for calling out my role in the late stages of that book’s evolution. As Dave Winer correctly documents, the “sweaty palms” effect of the pub reverberated throughout the tech world and in fact provided a kind of time bridge acros the blood/brain barrier into the worlds of music and film that I came from.

The worlds of MIDI and synthesizers, of SteadiCam and motion control, of flat bed editing and half-inch black and white Sony Portapacs and Tascam PortaSudios… all were an orchestration of user control over bits that we are now at the dawn of the next era. In the same way, what Winer and Bosworth and Lucovsky and Benioff wrought in vaulting XML to Web Services to Web 2.0 is finally seeing its premiere on AppleTV. Winer may not buy it, but it is the PortaStudio of today, the theatre of the mind that impels us to create the future. InfoWorld was the Rolling Stone of the tech revolution for a time, more so than Byte because it captured the weekly rhythm of the tech take-down.

If the Sixties were the Golden Age of music, we are exiting with InfoWorld print from the Eighties and Nineties “classic” wave. On stage, Tim is calling blogging as mainstream, asking what’s next. Are people going to become attention celbrities, he suggests rhetorically. Seth describes the breadcrumb effect of “millions of implicit data points” raining down from video objects. Where’s the business model, presses Tim. Is it the future not of voyeurism but targeted advertising, he asks. Seth cites the ISP “anonymous” but individualized sale of our clickstreams as a prelude to what he doesn’t refer to but is in fact the GestureBank model.

O’Reilly pushes once more on a Minority Report reality already implicitly in place. Tim asks the right question last, which is “Could a digital identity and attention identity be the same thing?” Once our phone becomes our credit card… says Tim. Attention Economy 2.0. RIP InfoWorld. Long live Twitter.

Mike Arrington, Tim Bray, and Jonathan Schwartz made for an interesting menage at Sun yesterday evening. As usual I wasn’t invited, but Scoble was otherwise occupied and forwarded me the invite. To be fair, Sun doesn’t know what to make of me. When I was in a position to get their attention as back page columnist at InfoWorld, the trade press model was something they could dance with. The analysts made their bones on quotes in the news stories, then resold their clout back through IT and the channel, with a white paper grey market. Even a mashup like the Gillmor Gang they got, but now?

Then the print books collapsed, the online page view wars accelerated the demise of the news sites, and Arrington & Company emerged. But wait, how does Sun fit into the Web 2.0 conversation? That’s a dicey one, what with the great profits and equally calamitous crash of the dot in Web 1.0 bet. So Sun comes up with the Ballmeresque developer developer developer dialogue, this time not with developers but the entrepreneurs who outsource their projects to India and S3. Not a bad idea, but as Tim posted, the lines around Mike were 10 deep.

Dan Farber whispered and then noted rhetorically that while you’d expect the opposite, Arrington was going deep on the tech while Bray was going 50 thousand feet on the ecosystem, VCs and the like. There was really very little sky between their two perspectives, and Jonathan would have been better served to stick around and go head to head with Mike. My instinct is that Jonathan read the room and the opportunity correctly, but then under a little pressure from Farber (who followed up a soft ball about a 60-day try and buy server program with a screamer about what the churn rate was) handled the ball cleanly–the program “is self-funding” meaning he wouldn’t tell us how many were returned but suggested that a few came back with volume orders–and shut a fascinating give and take down and split.

Arrington went deep and wide with his analysis of the world he so clearly dominates–the VC dilemma of how to engage in an S3 angel mashup conversation, his accelerating acknowledgement of the Microsoft collapse, and his gentle parrying of pitches from the assembled CEO wannabes. Bray took the counter-intuitive approach of sitting in front of a sign announcing the Sun Mashup Event and saying he’s been “less impressed with the notion of mashups than a lot of other people.” So many were Google Maps plus X, he chided, but in doing so he came perilously close to tripping over the elephant.

Tim’s leadership in the ODF meme highlights Sun’s problem in intoning the Google bell. Certainly OpenOffice was a tactical thrust in the Microsoft era, but in the Google Age, ODF is just as fundamentally obliterated as Office by my favorite words in GMail: Open as a Google Document. Once again Scott McNealy was ahead of the curve with his Big Freaking Webtone Switch. Yeah, and Google is delivering it. And where is Sun when the world gets divided up between Google and Apple, when Sun has to force its way onto the iPhone much the way they had to with Windows?

But there’s no mistaking the chances that Sun is willing to take, and I don’t mean open sourcing Solaris or Java or even the Sun Ray (which they really should do with Google Apps for Domains and bet the right horse now.) No, those were all great bets that Jonathan signalled two and three years ago and drove through as he consolidated his position. Now the chance they’re taking is to engage with the new media, and not make the mistake that this is a takeover by anybody but a refactoring of power around the user in charge. As Arrington said (I haven’t had time to look at the video so it might have been somebody else or some other night) this is about going direct. Once you get a taste of reading or listening or watching and making up your own mind based on your gut about the source, you don’t go back.

With Arrington, at the end of the day, he usually gets it right. Sometimes he goes a bit too hard at the old way versus the new way for my taste, but everybody needs something to believe in and I trust that he’s sincere there. But whatever it takes to get him there, it’s a journey he seldom fails to take us along on. And Jonathan showed something last night too; he showed up and went a round or so. He looked a little nervous, but like Clapton, he wasn’t afraid to lay out and take a bad review in trade for a good aftertaste. In those moments last night, things got interesting. About redacted time.

Just got off the phone and video with Loren Feldman, who is approaching a complete system crash mentally. I have been eagerly anticipating this, not wanting to accelerate the thing for fear of creating a dangerous life-threatening condition, but at the same time hoping that the continuing meltdown of the flogosphere would reach an epic moment.

Of course, twittering is helping the crisis immeasurably. Scoble pointed out to me yesterday that I was way too late in making any kind of anti-twitter statement by opting out: “That’s so old,” he said as I watched over his shoulder as he hit refresh over and over again on the twitterstream. Poor pathetic bastard. Reminds me of the night Joe Cocker sat slumped on the floor up against the wall at ShangriLa with a beer like he was watching TV. What would you do if I sang out of tune? Would you stand up and twitter on me?

In other news, it seems Jon Udell has returned to IT Conversations, where he and Dana Gardner and Doc and I started the Gillmor Gang all those years ago. I detect absolutely no impact whatsoever on Jon’s output from the move from InfoWorld to Microsoft, which both augurs well for how he’ll intersect with the upcoming MixO7 “Hi, we’re Microsoft and we’re not saying anything else” Tour and provides an alternate universe theory for the Great Blogosphere Implosion of March 07. I can’t wait for Steve Rubel to christen this twitting point sometime soon. But wait, Bob Lefetz is now railing against the Dave Clark Five joining the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Lefsetz continues to amaze. Hank Barry hipped me to him several years ago, and I quickly became mostly addicted to his 60’s stream-o-unconsciousness. But recently he’s moved into a kind of William F. Buckley stance, decrying Patti Smith’s entry and repeating once too often his hatred of the pinheads controlling the cartel archives. McCartney signing with Starbucks, now there is a real cartel-busting move. I don’t buy records except at Starbucks; just picked up a live Neil Young record from 1971.

So tonight I signed up for Twitter. Not sure why, except perhaps to feel more a part of the Blogopalypse. Scoble, please put some Twitter feeds in your link feed so I can understand it better. My bet is that aggregating them in Google Reader will either compress the signal to noise or create a swarm gesture lever. It would also be nice if Dave Winer would abstract his Twitter engine so I could pump such a Gesture feed through my Twitter feed instead of documenting the silence in incremental non-bursts. When someone says, “pull my finger” I find it hard to resist.

I’m in New York at the Open Data conference, hosted by AttentionTrust and Reuters. As if by some unseen uber-twitter, Ross Mayfield and Stowe Boyd have popped up recently with tomes on attention or the lack of it. ReadWrite Web also weighed in. The world shuddered briefly, wobbled on its axis, and rebooted. Hardly noticed it.

None of which fully masks the fact the blogosphere has collapsed into utter boredom. Last night at the Rock ‘n Roll Hall ceremonies, the talk was about whether Patti Smith and Van Halen disturbed the integrity of the Hall. This morning on the 30th floor of the Reuters building in Times Square, the talk is about the delta between a penny a click and the mass audience of Michael Eisner and Barry Diller. Is Diller right that there are only 12 talented people in the universe. Apparently.

The central conceit on the 30th floor is that open data is a moral question, not the only choice any media company can make in the face of the dominant user. “Figure out how to do it the right way.” “What if bad things happen?” If? The guy who leaked the AOL data says he should have gotten releases. And now he thinks it’s a good public awareness campaign. Helpng people help themselves.

“At the end, you do control the data.” This is the mind set on the 30th floor. “The larger data sets are more interesting.” Meanwhile, users everywhere are bored shitless. And completely in control of the gate.

Aggregate Knowledge: helping people find the things that they love. Overstock sends all their data to AK without the user’s consent. “Look at individual behavior on partner sites.” The Harry Potter problem. No matter what you look at it’s always related to Harry Potter.

BuzzMetrics: identify a group of influentials and contact them. Clusters of conversation. Alternate: Bush. Emotion words. Daily concerns win. Passion occurs in the daily flow. Floodgate: blogosphere in real time. Moving into second wave of other medias. Typical brand audit 50 to 100 thousand.

Compete: Commodity data licensed to them. 2 million in the panel US only. Monitoring user behavior and sold. Correlation of cookies with offline data. Freeing runoff data. Alexa population, Pluck API opened up: 10 million worldwide. How many people visit site in top million… Moving toward recommendations. upromise toolbar, get their brand closer to user. upromise mall, get credit. Dollar a person per year in ISP market scrape. Comcast $.40 clickstream a month. How many times is that resold at no additional cost? 10% of clicks are already being sold. No VoIP or video data. How do we give back more than clickstream data?

The GestureBank is a collection of individual Internet user activity that has been stripped of all personal identification and aggregated into a central pool of anonymous behavior, all under the control of the users. This pool of electronic gestures represents a new kind of media experience, created, owned and controlled explicitly by the users who contribute to it, but available as content in aggregate or in different affinity clusters to others who have interest. The GestureBank Extension (GBX) works in concert with the existing AttentionTrust Extension (ATX) to enable users to route their Attention data to approved services.

What is GestureBank?

Fundamentally, the GestureBank is an Attention Service that hosts the open pool of anonymized gesture data.

How does it work?

The GBX2 works in conjunction with the ATX to submit gestures into the open pool using the user’s unique gesture key.

How does GestureBank relate to the ATX?

The GestureBank uses the GBX2 in conjunction with the ATX recording functionality to submit user data to the open pool.

Who owns the data?

The user owns the data; the AT holds the data in proxy for the user. The user can delete already-submitted data using post-filtering or full stream deletion.

How is privacy protected?

The underlying principle of the GestureBank is that the user is in charge and that the user opts-in from the very start. The user can opt-out whenever they want. With the existing ATX black-listing capabilities and future enhancements to the GBX2, users can keep private information or self-identifying information out of the pool — if they desire. The user opts-in and they are responsible.

How will AT.org achieve critical mass of user data contribution?

From Day One, as clean data populates the pool under user control.

What is the history of development of GB?

The GestureBank has been co-designed by Steve Gillmor and Robert W. Anderson; initial development borrowed from existing ATX and Attention Toolkit code; with all coding for the initial beta completed by Robert. Since gifting to the AttentionTrust, Steve and Robert remain in charge of design; while coding has been handed off to Cori Schlegel.

GestureBank Definitions

Gesture Key: The user’s identifying key. Shared between user & GB. Each user has one. Created by the GBX2 or by Web site.

Affinity Service: A service, like Affinity Service, that registers with the Trust to provide services based on affinity. Referred to, generically, as a Service.

Affinity Group: A grouping of GB contributors. Group membership is managed through the GB in trust for the users in contract with a specific Service. A Service can have multiple Affinity Groups.

Affinity Group Key: The key that the Service uses to identify the affinity group. A Service can have multiple affinity groups. Shared between Service & GB. Note: This is part of the service APIs and is not surfaced to users.

Affinity Key: A unique key that identifies the user to the Affinity Group. This is generated by the GB when a user joins a Service. It is shared between the GB, the Service, and the user; however, the user doesn’t need to see it, work with it, etc.

Affinity Invitation: A one-time or many use URL allowing a user to join an affinity group.

GBX2: The GestureBank Firefox extension. This extension manages the user’s gesture key and provides other affinity membership functions.

ATX: Existing Attention Trust Recorder

Affinity Services enabled through GestureBank

One value of the GestureBank Affinity Service model is it extends the “in it
or win it” authentication model out to 3rd party services. This model
allows users to become members of the GestureBank anonymously. And now,
leveraging the anonymous nature of the GestureBank, 3rd party Affinity
Services can invite their users anonymously as well. Unlike other services
which provide information about their users publicly (e.g., MyBlogLog,
Technorati Favorites), GestureBank-enabled Affinity Services can be built to
aggregate interesting information about their users without requiring
knowledge of who they are.

This new model enables more types of services where the user may be happy to
share data with that service, but only on an anonymous level.

How will applications interact with the GestureBank?

The GestureBank uses the Attention Trust approved and user-vetted Attention Recorder (the Attention Trust Extension, or ATX) for submitting user attention data to the GestureBank. The ATX has undergone no modifications regarding the GestureBank (in fact it has only been modified to ensure support for the latest versions of Firefox).

In conjunction with the ATX, GestureBank also relies on the GestureBank key management extension. The GBX bolts on to the ATX and provides overall GestureBank membership, authentication, anonymization functions as well as Affinity Group membership functionality.

In general, applications will interact with the GestureBank either through direct API access or, preferably, through the use of their own hosted (custom) services. Such services combine both the notion of the Attention Service (as directly supported by the ATX) with the new concept of an Affinity Service. Note that Affinity Services can support many Affinity Groups.

A third-party client application id then able to retrieve GestureBank anonymized Attention data from its own hosted service.

How does an Affinity Service work?

Affinity Services act are anonymized Attention Services for members of their Affinity Groups. As these members are anonymous to the Affinity Services, the GestureBank provides a unique user key ( i.e., the Affinity Key) that identifies the user to the Service.

To associate users with the Affinity Service, the Service issues open or private invitations. Users accept these invitations through the GBX2. This association between the GestureBank user and the groups to which they belong is not made public; however, the Service can uniquely identify the user with the Affinity Key.

Once a user has accepted the invitation, their Attention data will be contributed directly to the Affinity Service tagged with the user’s Affinity Key (the actual Affinity Key is obtained through an authentication mechanism with the GestureBank).

How do I create an Affinity Service?

The first step is to register your Affinity Service with the Attention Trust. With registration comes API access to the Affinity Service APIs. While the process for registering new Services has not yet been finalized, please do not consider registering your service if you have not adopted the four principles of the Attention Trust.

Once a Service has been registered, you can create / update / delete one or more Affinity Groups and public or private invitations to those groups through the API.

What is the GestureBank API like?

Apart from the basics of contribution supported by the Attention Toolkit, the GestureBank API currently supports registration and authentication with the GestureBank itself, as well as Affinity Group authentication, invitation creation, and invitation acceptance/cancellation. There is yet no formal query API; given that an Affinity Service will often act as its own Attention Service those APIs are left to the developers of the individual affinity groups to build.

Opt-out API for Affinity Services

The GestureBank honors the opt-out (post delete) contract with its users. By extension, the GestureBank requires that Affinity Services honor this same contract. This requires the Affinity Service to provides a standard API call for the GestureBank to use in the case that a user opts-out of the GestureBank. The GestureBank will invoke this API method for all Affinity Services to which the user is (or was) a member. The Affinity Service will then delete the user’s data.

All set for the Academy Awards tonight and I get this Gmail package from an anonymous Hollywood friend. Seems some folks like Harrison Ford and Sandra Bullock thought it was about time to thank all the little people for all the real work that gets done making movies. But you won’t see it tonight on the Oscars–the tribute was rejected at the last minute by the show producers.

I’ve posted it on this shareable player so you can copy and share it on the Net. Or you can download the MP4 here. Thanks for helping out.

There’s a moment on this John Lennon Starbucks compilation Remember where the studio chatter after a breakdown reveals this phrase — wry, tabloid theatrical, perfect. Ringo cops to it, and Lennon gracefully refocuses. Another moment a decade later, Just Starting Over, and a middle eight that McCartney must surely have recognized as equal to the best of their collaboration. And again at the Grammies of all places, when The Police returned in extraordinary power.

It’s tempting to write musicians off as self-absorbed children frozen in the moment, blessed with an out-of-body talent that transcends responsibility and whatever passes for empathy in this crazy world. But it doesn’t matter; they’re not kidding themselves, it turns out, and meet the same fates we all do, every day of their lives too.

That said, it’s just too fucking bad I can’t remember my Yahoo user ID so I can log on to Pipes or any of this other “cool” stuff that Yahoo is doing. You say you want a revolution, well you can just count me out (in) only if you can remember one of the thousand IDs I’ve logged on to Yahoo with over the years of ignoring all their cool apps. Let me say it again: one of the uncountable and unretainable number of IDs and passwords since the dawn of Internet time. Yahoo mail? Nope. Yahoo Photos? Nope. Flickr? Maybe if I’ve luckily avoided the transition to Yahoo IDs. Doesn’t matter, because I don’t post to Flickr either because I don’t want to risk finding out I don’t know my Yahoo ID.

It’s not Bradley Horowitz’s fault really, although I’ve mentioned it to every one of his product managers over the last X years and it never gets fixed. “Why not go back into the vaults to my first Yahoo ID, which probably is registered when I was atInfoWorld or eWEEK or maybe even InformationWeek Labs and no longer have the email to change the password.” What are the chances that my ID is not the first one on the stack. Gillmor didn’t used to be so ubiquitous — it was just Dan and me on the Net. Now of course there’s the idiot Republican congressman with his own slick new blog andGillmor the dog spamming my vanity feed. But can we get some action from Yahoo Central? No, and it’s a shame because Bradley and team are doing (I hear) some neat stuff.

However, neat stuff is not enough to move the needle for me (and I suspect you) these days. Remember the 20th Century when software was sold in boxes? Where are we today? Not just no boxes, but no software either. I’m trying to remember how Starting Over goes without going out to the car to retrieve the CD. It’s not the song, or the bridge, anymore: it’s the landgrab that the bridge makes, and the delicious fact that you are held captive by the song never returning there again. Solution: play the song again. This morning in the silence of a Sunday I could hear it. Now for the life of me I can’t pull the trigger. And I’m actually happy with that. The software is important only in that I know it exists, not in how it works.

Google Reader is proving dominant (who knew) as it releases self-perpetuating gesture data. I hesitate to look at the Trends page, as I’ve been so busy I have hardly touched the J key as Scoble would put it. If it wasn’t for Robert’s linkblog, I’d just U-2 it over TechMeme and head back to the Blackberry. Thank God for Marc Canter; at least he’s still excited by something. Of course I check in at Scripting News, glad that it’s still working and yet ever mystified that Dave pulled the plug on OPML dev when he did. Hugh MacLeod seems to be adjusting his meds quite nicely in the past few days; I’m understanding less and getting more for it. Calacanis is a study in distilled megalomania. If The Police can reform so can Arrington.

So, questions:

• Who did the strings on Walls and Bridges?
• What is my favorite TV show (Studio 60 wold be the right answer if it had a remote chance of survival)?
• Which is the more disruptive from a business perspective: a large decaf McDonalds coffee with 6 creams or a Venti Decaf Latte?
• Who was the most arrogant of the three at The Police Rehearsal press event (careful this is a trick question)?
• How many times is the word “fucking” used in Working Class Hero? Not allowed to go to the car to get the CD.
• Did John Lennon think he was better in The Beatles or on his own?
• Is podcasting dead?

And the answers:

• Nobody
• Nothing
• Neither
• Nobody
• Twice
• No
• What went wrong

Jonathan Schwartz has a problem. Me. I read his blog today, starting with the most recent post and eventually landing on one a few days ago about the resurgence of the thick client. Let me weigh in thusly : what a load of shit this is. When Sun leadership starts moving away from the Google sweet spot and toward god knows what users-love-client-code idiocy, it’s big trouble for the Sun boys. Dave Winer is swimming in muddy waters too with his anti-Lucovsky Google-is-deprecating-SOAP of all things in favor of the Ajax RESTian Web-only API that Mark is evangelizing on Scoble’s show.

First, Jonathan. I went to a Sun press party tonight that was remarkable in its failure to deliver any promised executives. Dan Farber found a few lurking in the rear of the room, but no Jonathan, no Papadopoulos, no Fowler. I found myself longing for the good old McNealy days, when Scott’s Microsoft jabs and hockey jive kept the room moving. A Google party a few weeks ago was in full swing before Sergey and Larry showed up, and their presence almost came as an afterthought. Marc Benioff threw a luncheon to announce the latest iterations of the Salesforce build-out, and instead of playing to the middle of the pack, excelled in a detail-rich deep dive into his company’s mining of its customer base as the evolution of Microsoft’s developer strategy. That’s entertainment, folks.

I thought I would miss the end of the Gang more than I have. Mike Arrington’s flareup with Sethi and his revolving news desk door would have made for a lively session or two, but Mike’s week-later wrap of the Sethi situation blew away the bullshit and out-ValleyWagged Denton to boot. I’ve been pitching in with Jason to tighten up his Cast for the Kids, letting me troll the blogosphere for news bites without having to work too hard or miss the roundtable so much. I spent a great three days or so with Doc, Phil Windley, Kaliya, Dick Hardt, and Kim Cameron among others in the Identity Workshop, talked with Mike Vizard and Dana Gardner intermittently, and watched Robert Anderson and Cori Schlegel cross the line and merge GestureBank with the AttentionTrust only a few weeks behind schedule. And Gabe Rivera chimed in a few days ago in email asking what it would look like if I resurfaced. An eight-foot invisible rabbit.

The thick client: why is Jonathan floating this lead balloon? To get some blogoversy? Probably. His slick sales pitches don’t register, and one of the best guys on his feet in the business seems hamstrung by his day job. He should take a look at what Jon Udell is doing. The new show business is actionable information on demand, spiced with a healthy disrespect for marketing bullshit and strategic kindergarten. Take Edelman’s alliance with Newsgator to provide pre-gamed conversations. Nice: avoid the messy run-up to PayPerPost stench, and go right for the stupid notion that people won’t immediately look not at the approved conversation but at the telltale odor of the missing links. Attention: the “customers” are listening now. Think of the stream as meditation.

Spare me the garbage that we need real code running on the client. If you want to know what a vendor is afraid of, figure out what competitor they’re more afraid of. Is it Adobe with Apollo, eroding Java’s device penetration lead? It’s certainly not Microsoft? If you want to see why I’m so relaxed, go look at CrittendenIV’s post about this five tags bullshit. He mentioned me at the end so it bubbled up in my vanity feed, but there’s no way I can match or even come close to this guy. A star is born. By contrast, Jonathan’s bizarre thesis that the browser is a Winerian locked trunk is a) probably true, and b) so the fuck what. Mozilla forever put the lie to that theory when Firefox jujitsued Microsoft’s market standards into a commodity.  Papadopoulos levels about Sun’s difficulty in driving sales in the Web 2 value chain no matter how right they are in their technology bets. Jonathan changes the subject to clients. Why?

Similarly, Dave is changing the subject from god knows what to JSON and Ajax API and for what reason? Dave is one of the most efficient if not the supreme political pragmatist, so why is he bringing up these subjects? Who am I supposed to be scared of? Google? Nope, if the Ajax API and the terms of service around including unaltered adsense are so counter to user interest, that will precipitate a decline in usage and therefore less adoption of Google properties. Seems self-correcting to me: user votes, user wins. Why do we need saving here?

Who, then, is Dave’s competitor? Is he caught, like Microsoft, competing against his own success? RSS won, and Dave did it. I’ll wait while nobody argues with this. Good. Now we live in an RSS world. What to do next? I say it’s gestures, but I don’t care what you think about that. Let’s say I’m right, that the world will move from inference to direct testimony, from links to gesture feeds, from push to accept, from pressure to permission. In that world, do we need protection? Or does Dave need to reinvent himself in this brave new world he launched?

It’s tough to teach an old dog new tricks, the saying goes. But Dave is not your average bear. He’s tough, cunning, honest, and vulnerable. There’s an opening to ignore what I’m saying as personal, but honestly all politics are local, and deeply personal. I’m not counting Dave, or Jonathan, out. But they need to face the music. They’ve outgrown the jobs they invented for themselves, and it’s time to grow again.

Oh, and Microsoft, you guys better step up right now and cut this RSS patent cancer out before we do it without anesthesia.

The Gillmor Gang — Mike Vizard, Jason Calacanis, Dan Farber, Doc Searls, Robert Anderson, Dana Gardner, and Sam Whitmore — give thanks and look forward to what comes next. Recorded Wednesday November 22, 2006.

Apparently there’s a bootleg copy of this Friday’s Gillmor Gang circulating the Net, or so suggests Jason Calacanis. Since anyone who’s been a guest on the show could have dialed in, who knows who the culprit might be. My bet is Jonathan Schwartz. I’ll have the complete show up over the weekend.

Thoughts:

I resubscribed to The Gillmor Gang because I managed to burn through Leo Laporte’s “This Week in Tech”. Could someone smack me the next time I do this? From listening to Steve go on and on and on about Earthlink and GoDaddy during the first few minutes of EVERY F-ING PODCAST to listening to the same crap rehashed over and over, it’s enough to drive one batty. If Steve Gillmor is content, and Leo Laporte is production, I’ll take production every time. (Attention Doc Searls: if you ever create your own podcast, please let us know. I’d take an hour of you reading recipies from a cookbook over listening to the roundtable from hell).

I’m in Washington for a workshop on attention and gestures. In the cab on the way to the hotel I called in to the Gillmor Gang recording, as did Mike Arrington, Jason Calacanis, Robert Anderson, Hugh MacLeod, Dan Farber, and Doc Searls. There’s a lot of nice moments in between the cell phone noise and intermittencies, including a funny section where we all reminisce about our favorite Gang moments.

It’s no secret that the Gang has gotten polarized around what Doc calls two factions, those who enjoy the dance of the startups and gorillas of the enterprise space, and those who don’t. At some point Jason arrived from the airport at his destination, and dropped off the call with his version of my now-familiar “see you next time if there is a next time.” What followed was pretty intense.

I’m not going to release that part of the show, even though the dropped segments shorten the show from its required length to what will likely be 3 episodes. Failing to deliver the full complement of 5 shows may force me to produce 2 additional segments, but I will evaluate that while editing the show on the flight back on Sunday. After 3 days of Web 2.0. an AttentionTrust board meeting, a cross-country flight, and many months of turmoil on and around the Gang, frankly, I snapped.

Fundamentally, the reason I am redacting the show is that I don’t like what I was saying and thinking on this show, at least the part after Jason signed off. What Nick Douglas called hyper reality the other night in describing the show may be entertaining, but when I find myself not liking me all that much…. After the show I called my friend Hank Barry up and did all I could to not break down and cry about it. I just can’t stand what I’m doing, no matter how well it works.

Luckily for me, the Gang are generous and gentle in the face of my manipulative behavior. I couldn’t ask for a more supportive set of friends and colleagues. They deserve better than me losing my way. They lend their celebrity, their expertise, their generosity of spirit, their time. And, when the chips are down, the blunt truth. Couldn’t ask for better friends.

I’ll figure it out. Over and over at Web 2.0 I heard from friends and strangers how much they enjoy the Gang adventures. When it works it’s thrilling to be a part of. Today it worked for a while and then it went south. You get the first part. Maybe I’ll get Phil Spector to put strings on the other stuff.

Some listeners are reporting a problem with Part I of the Harpo Gang series. I have just deleted it from the Podshow site and am reuploading it. It should then repropagate to iTunes. If not, I’ve sent word to Podshow about the issue.

We recorded the Gillmor Gang this morning, with Calacanis, Arrington, Farber, Searls, Gardner, and Anderson present and accounted for. What with the usual bifurcation between enterprise (MS/Novell) and Web 2 oh (Arrington/Calacanis), I should have spent more time trying to stitch things together than I did. But I made the decision early to lay out as much as possible and see what the underlying dynamics of a Gillmor-less Gang felt like.

At first, it felt awkward to not jump in when I normally would. But I was listening for the air around those moments, wondering whether my thoughts would be obvious by their absence. In gestural terms, not a negative or neutral gesture, but something different. Perhaps a gesture of silence, where the listener/other party is encouraged to either fill in the blank with some of what might have been said if I were more active, or failing that, some cue to indicate whether the silence could be inferred either as support or opposition to the thrust of the audible content.

Once I started listening that way, I could hear various of The Gang stepping up: of course, Jason, Dana, then Farber (who tried to draw me in), Arrington and eventually the usually silent Robert Anderson, who overtly drew me in with direct questions about what I might be doing. Only then did I directly respond, saying I couldn’t talk about it or words to that effect. While some took that as an evasion, in fact I was trying hard not to disrupt the balance of the show that was in the process of emerging.

Many folks have commented on my role as moderator, presuming that I see myself in that role or don’t do enough to keep things entertaining and moving along. In recent weeks, as the show became more soap operatic and less tied to any overriding theme, most forgot those concerns and sat back and enjoyed the interplay of the personalities. Today, I got a chance to do that as well, albeit with a small amount of guilt at not living up to that moderator role that I never have really taken on. By maintaining radio silence I hoped to coax out a new sense of responsibility on the part of The Gang for keeping the flow intact, and to some extent that worked.

But I wasn’t particularly hopeful that my opting out would have a particularly entertaining effect, as I assumed that the balance of the show would suffer from my absence. But, as time went on, it became easier and easier to remain quiet, even when what I was hearing was so diametrically opposed to my view that I strained to bite my tongue. Each of those moments came and went, and each time, the Gang grew more comfortable with their new shared role as moderator.

The net effect: a self-correcting organism. Although the group periodically rebelled against the change, and took to punctuating points or riffs with deprecating swipes at me, by and large the show settled into some usual rhythms. I tried to remind the audience of my presence intermittently to delineate the difference between being there and remaining silent and not being there at all. This was not entirely successful, right up to the moment at the end after Jason took it upon himself to deliver my usual signoff, where Doc waited a beat and then said quizzically, “Steve?” I immediately replied, and Doc delivered a good chuckle.

Doc and I have been on hiatus recently from Attention Deficit Theatre, which is essentially a full-blown version of this type of experiment every time. It is created in an opposite manner, by talking incessantly until we hit the mode where Doc’s funny light is turned on, but the effect of listening for the silences in the spaces between the words produces similar results. There were several moments of counterpoint on the show as well, where discussion about various maters took on overtones of irony and “found” music in the cracks.

If you’re assuming there were untold reasons why I took this route, of course there were. Existing in the eye of a hurricane where the context and suppositions about media, technology, authority, and monetization swirl and intermingle with the professional and creative lives of the people on the show, the themes are so intertwined with career, strategy, and ego that they are hard to engage with without becoming overwhelmed and depressed by them. But coming from a place where a small group of us started these experiments not so very long ago to one where audience expectations and business relationships appear to trump those original motivations, I will still come down on the side of discovery, transparency, and hopefully, trust.

After the show, I tried to reach each of the Gang to do a post mortem, particularly Dan Farber, who seemd a bit non-plussed by the experience but not suprisingly, fundamentally supportive of what I was dealing with. In general, I think you’ll see that the show has its moments as they all do, suffers a bit from my arbitrary silences, and in the end prepares the way for a more supple shared authority that will be an important part of the next phase of things.

One of the advantages of being so far behind the blogostream is that I get to read Nick Carr after we’ve done a show on his target, in this case Microsoft a year after Ray Ozzie’s famous memo. On this week’s Gillmor Gang, we go slow and deep on the same issues Nick refactors, particularly including Dan Farber’s drive-by conversation with Ray last week. Nick says Microsoft has been distracted.

In another Nick post, Marc Cuban’s Google/YouTube “insider” leak is given a ride. It seems there is some relationship between the deal and the 3 content deals struck earlier that morning, with creators cut out of the deal. What, gambling?

Now, I really don’t mean to snark the Snarkmaster here. But with Mike Arrington on vacation, who is going to put forth the obvious questions here? Like why is Pluck out of business? Why is Scoble so far up Google Reader that he can see daylight for the River of News? Why is Jotspot’s buyout not seen as the beginning of the end of the wiki “business” too? Or if you want to put lipstick on it, a Notes-like development model for Google Office?

Microsoft has always operated on the margins of the venture capital business. It used to be when this unbubble type of activity swirled, we’d see Charles Fitzgerald counter-punch to the stomach with chuckles about the collapse of the Webubble 2.0 ecosystem: What, undisclosed terms? Now that IE7 is shipping, RSS is a feature, not a product. Etc. But so far we’re not seeing it, not even Peter O’Kelly’s timely (for Microsoft) reality checks. What gives?

What gives is that inside Microsoft the word at the highest levels is: We will do anything and everything we have to in order to avoid it being done to us. Distracted? No. Attacking competitor froth in the Web services sector? No, we’re too far bought in to the model to FUD it. The customer is running away from us. It’s Office 97 all over again and we aren’t the vendor. We’re getting Trojan Horsed on our own petard by a bunch of stupid flyweight apps that are congealing as we dither. We know we’re fucked and we’re standing in a circular firing squad. Mommy.

Mary Jo’s fabulous ZDNet conversation with Jim Allchin (another sure sign of the impending Offocalypse) produced some razorsharp focus on the fundamental issue: How quickly can Google integrate the small floater teams in the GOffice solar system? Difficult, he said, but not impossible. Allchin? Those of you Web 2 oh-ers out there should take my word for it. You have never seen this kind of direct , bluster-free, beyond-scared and approaching-acceptance talk from the top of the Redmond Wall. Just because Jim is retiring doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

We’re seeing a vast and super-accelerated purge of industry dynamics. The speed of this is separating the men from the boys. Ask yourself who the leaders really are at this point? Only one in my book: Ray Lane. He’s the closest thing to a mashup of vendor and VX; let’s call it vendor capital. Yahoo is on the ropes, more psychologically then financially, but in the process are abandoning their ownership of the vendor capital meme as they argue about where their offices are really located. The crap about a patent play on attention (even in its parenthetical rider to the Tagging Bill form) is a sure sign of atrophy and chip-counting.

The other Ray is slowed by his lip service to the rich client. Even though he’s already come most if not all of the distance to the new party, he’s not yet found the way to communicate to Ballmer and therefore the board just how quickly the work needs to be done. Somewhere there’s a new Halloween document that says who lives and who gets a nice package. Office Live? Dead. Windows Live, the only chance they have. They have to look at the world through their customer’s eyes.

What do I see when I look out, over the Palisades to California. Yes it’s the new Steinberg New Yorker cover, with GMailReaderCal (don’t blink) in the foreground cityscape, YouTube videos flowing down the Hudson River, Google Docs and GChats streaming West on an unbroken superhighway packed with iPods and cache stations.

I finally finished The Beatles. Damned if they didn’t break up. I had an inkling, what with the Yoko thing and all. But they were just too good, too rich, too far out ahead. It just goes to show you… what? From the time Brian Epstein died to the end — 2 years. Was it because the manager left the company (and the planet?) No. In fact, the other way around. I’d venture Brian died because he fell into a massive unrecoverable depression when he realized he was no longer needed or effective.

It wasn’t the flailing attempts to reinvent business with Apple, or the drugs, or the Maharishi that did it. It was the collapse of the central nervous system — the idea of The Beatles. What came next? Business as usual. Watergate. Peace with honor. Windows. As hard as it was to imagine then or is to imagine now, the Microsoft dream is over. Replaced by Google? No, the Stones didn’t replace the Fab Four. The idea of what was possible changed.

That’s why it’s a losing proposition to look at this logically through Bill’s or even Ray’s eyes. And despite what it may seem, not through Eric’s and Sergey’s and Larry’s eyes either. When I look out the Steinberg window on the world, I see through the interfaces and the services to the ideas, the notes, the coming attractions, the harbingers of fate, the mysteries of the black holes where the truly valuable data live. Each rumble of the Blackberry on the bedside table, the flush of Beale and Hawk and Farber photos swarming around the latest stupid event, the slow, measured steps leading into the Gesture pool, the equally slow dawning realization of a self-sustaining platform built not on disruption but sustained validation by the meritocracy of the Network.

These are not Utopian dreams. The myth of monopoly is utopian, and ephemeral to boot. Survival depends on pragmatic analysis and action, sometimes risky, always an imperative. The father rushes out to push his daughter out of the oncoming truck not of decision but of chemical logic. We’re not predicting the future, we’re practising it.

If you don’t believe me, convince yourself. Take the time to explain how Microsoft gets from here to any possible there. Don’t work backward from IT’s supposed hammerlock on the enterprise. The Gang this week swarmed around a 1 to 2 year window in which Live would emerge to challenge Google. Technically, not a problem. Can they roll out an on-demand rich client in that time frame? Forget that they say it won’t work on the Web, that it needs the power of the client. A year ago McNealy and I argued this very point to a draw, around the notion that intelligent caching wins.

Lucovsky’s Hailstorm project was just such an engine, revolving around a huge in memory database not at all dissimilar in practice if not in scope to the memory pool pushed into GMail and GReader every time you log-in, and periodically expanding and contracting around new data. Elegantly, chats are spooled off into storage; not so elegantly, I can get GReader to lock up Firefox by stuffing too many feed items into the list view by paging ahead (or back in time.) These limits will be tweaked and steadily reduced to non-issues by reducing each individual app’s memory allocation dynamically and taking advantage of common services (chat, blending of incoming messages and stories, and gesture-led intelligent prioritization of all of the above.)

Again, can Microsoft do this too. Yes. Will they? Again, eventually (and probably sooner than Nick and Dan think) yes. But where they have to fight through internal fueds and amortization tables, Google has no barrier to speak of except handling the fundamental shifts in page rank relevance and authority that the gesture disruption unleashes. We’re moving into a time of user control of rank, the access to it and the pricing of that access. Google knows this to be true; otherwise, why on earth would they commit to providing API access to GReader behavior data? Yahoo’s bet: a patent application around “activity.” Again, fuck you Yahoo.

Will Microsoft unleash our attention data? My bet: Yes. Now look again out the Steinberg window. Instead of it being a Google window we’re looking through, it’s a Google/Microsoft frame. Where is the rich client in this picture? Not what Ray is trying to sell us, a transitional Office-controlled window with enhanced network services, where the heavy lifting is around advanced synchronization of multiple stores? Instead, it’s an array of licensed objects — widgets if you will — that are granted access by users and companies to appropriate data about who we are and what we’re interested in hearing about. When I hear someone telling me about a new attention service, and what they are going to “allow” the user to do, I hear the sound of the bullet falling into the chamber in Russian roulette.

For Microsoft, it’s the same simple calculation. How do you level the playing field, paint yourself into the Steinberg window? By intercepting the user at the moment before the data emerges onto the network. Once it’s out of the user’s control, it plays to the owners of the previous model’s power base — Google’s 400,000 advertisers. In a user-controlled model, it’s the user that grants access to the more efficient gestures and pooled behavior that drives advertising impressions past lead gen to a hyper-efficient channel model.

Ray’s choice is stark: Bet against the idea that Hailstorm can trump the rich client, or unbundle the user’s behavior from Windows and deliver it to the user’s control. It’s a bold and dangerous step, but taking to heart what Ray and Steve are actually saying internally, not a great stretch from where they already are, and one which brings their existing assets into play rather than being held captive by them. It’s a two minute offense, but guess what time it is.

Those of you waiting for this week’s Gillmor Gang should look for the episodes to start streaming tomorrow morning some time. I received a nice note from Doc Searls explaining his absence, but nothing from Mike Arrington, who apparently is on vacation beyond email for the next week. I saw Yahoo’s Chad Dickerson tonight at Sylvia Paull’s CyberSalon and hipped him to the fucked up Yahoo patent application, so maybe some brains will start applying themselves in the near future over there. Chad was telling Scott Rosenberg how exciting the Hack Day and Beck performance was, and indicating the powers that be were thinking more of that energy might be a good thing. Go get’em Chad. How about Bob Dylan? Macy Gray? Gnarls Barkley?

Steven Levy spoke at the CyberSalon, and you could tell from his eyes what a labor of love his book on the iPod is. No matter what bullshit I go through on the Gang, it remains a joy to be involved with these great minds. Those who like what we’re doing feel that, regardless of the ephemeral issues we all know about. We are so incredibly lucky to be doing this; don’t let my frustration and sometimes anger fool you. I’m having the time of my life.

However, I’ve been reluctant to mix the show until I could stand to listen to the first segment. I will understand if you skip to Part II; I almost stopped the show about 20 minutes in. But that’s what it took to coax Jason in off the roof. So it’ll stay in, a monument to my pathetic “talent” as moderator, and yet a living breathing thing where you can hear the feel shift right before your eyes. See you tomorrow.

this is another test of the google docs to wordpress

Late last night Marshall Kirkpatrick of Techcrunch IMed me about a Flickr patent application that appears to attempt to privatize attention data, their “special sauce” they call lookingforness. Thomas Hawk, who I’ve come to know recently for his gentlemanly intelligence and skill as a digital photographer, posted on the subject in the context of his Zoomer startup. Marshall pointed me at another post on the subject as well. Should we be worried?

Also last night I had a conversation with Dan Farber, who’d sent me a note after the Gillmor Gang recording to the effect that I might want to pull out a phrase from an exchange with Dan. I usually like to let the session sit for a few hours (or days if I can get away with it) to percolate, so I haven’t yet found the section he’s talking about. We also talked about a few other “memes” out there, including one fairly uncomplimentary one regarding a friend of mine who runs one of the major tech companies. Should he be worried?

The beginning of the Gang recording was marred by a back story issue between Jason Calacanis and me, where I had called him after his Seattle keynote announcing his new radio show. As one blogger put it in a post that seems to have disappeared, “I think that new podcast of Jason Calacanis will also practically annihiliate (sic) Steve Gillmor ’s podcast - Gillmor Gang.” Indeed. Ever since I first invited Mike Arrington on the show some months ago, it’s been a week-to-week soap opera, or train wreck as one called it, where the musical question is who will quit first. Many hoped it would be me.

High water everywhere. Neither Doc or Mike Arrington showed up for yesterday’s session. That seems odd in Doc’s case — I’d wanted to institutionalize the shift from Friday to Thursday instituted last week, but Doc said he couldn’t make Thursday. In Arrington’s case, not so odd. In recent weeks he’s threatened to opt out of IM; he rarely answers his cell or landline. In general he’s reliable only to Techcrunch. Understandable. But not good for me. It’s been 24 hours now and no word from either Doc or Mike. Remember: Jason only joined the show because of them. Should I be worried?

Look at the bright side, someone invariably says. The show continues to get better each time. Didn’t miss Arrington’s cluelessness about Microsoft, nor Doc’s refocusing of attention toward intention and VRM when gestures are not just about marketplaces but as a result of an open one. I don’t appreciate the cavalier lack of a head’s up or a tail’s down or whatever, but I understand the demands on these guys’ time. Mostly, I just am tired of the wrangling moderator role that I’m neither good at nor interested in. To Mobile Fan Guy’s point about Jason’s new show, yes it will annihilate Gillmor Gang, or at least the parts of it I’m not willing to keep doing.

So here are the rules of future Gillmor Gangs. If you know you can’t make the show, let me know. If you miss the show, let me know within a reasonable amount of time so I don’t feel like an idiot for wondering during the show where the hell you are. This applies to guests as well. Marc Benioff has been scheduled for the show a number of times and bailed as many at the last moment; I discussed this with him at the recent Salesforce event and he suggested he’d do it the following week from Hawaii on his vacation. I followed up with PR; no response. No more invites, Marc.

By contrast, Gabe Rivera and Robert Anderson have been invited specifically to lurk on the show. Gabe may look and act like a quiet contemplative guy, but he’s not kidding me. Beneath that subtly perplexed signature beats the heart of a revolutionary — conservative no doubt, a Che Guevera in a Hugh MacLeod $4k suit — but loaded for bear with attitude. As such, his silences often speak louder than the words he edits out. Robert Anderson hit his stride on this week’s show; not since Udell left has there been a technologist voice on the line. As the world catches up to where he’s been for quite some time, the question of what he’s doing there will answer itself.

Speaking of Hugh, he didn’t show either. But he has always been prompt to respond to the dial-in thread, whether in or out, and I took his silence this week to mean out. Hugh seems to share a certain sense of rhythm and the art of laying out; last week’s show with him as a British Ed Sullivan at a TechCrunch UK party bought him vacation time this week, if he so chose it. Should I be worried? No. I’m worried about his cigarette addiction.
I’m reminded of the time I got a call from someone connected with XML Magazine, the publication I ran as editor-in-chief and editorial director before Mike VIzard hired me away to InfoWorld. The issue was the (im)propriety of Adam Bosworth as back page columnist for the magazine. When I asked him to do it, he was somewhere between Microsoft and BEA, after his CrossGain startup that got shut down over his non-compete with Redmond. This was in the days before Adam went totally direct with his blog, but when Adam went to BEA, the question was whether a vendor could be agnostic. Of course, as we now know, the answer is doh.

But the pressure kept coming back my way, not because my opinion was being sought, but because my action had clashed with the old model, or whatever mutation of it passed for an editorial model by that time. Now I was being asked to unring the bell, or validate it. Understand I am not attacking the ethics or legitimacy of the question, or the motives of superb journalists and responsible publishers. What I am saying is that my asking Adam to write this column, and him accepting, were gestures that existed in and of themselves as ground won along the road to the frontier of communications that we are more obviously engaged in today — YouTube, wikis, blogs, RSS, attention, especially gestures, the meta meta layer. So to answer the question of whether this was appropriate or not felt more like whether I was being asked whether I still beat my wife. Understand the question. Don’t understand why you’re asking me this. In other words, what the fuck did you think I was doing when I asked Adam to do this if it wasn’t appropriate. Clearly I felt it would have been inappropriate not to ask this favor, and a pure gift that Adam agreed to do it.

So should we be worried about Arrington and Searls not showing up? Hell, yes. Should we be worried about Yahoo attempting to blindly, stupidly, Passport-like, dumbass, Amazon-bait, whatever damn adjective makes this even more rude, lock down “lookingforness” as an attention land grab? Well, for one, let’s look to CSA Ray Ozzie of Microsoft, who in his previous role at Groove weighed in on a patent claim on browser plugins against Microsoft and Internet Explorer with prior art from Notes from back in the 19th century, for a Clue. Fuck you, Yahoo.

And should I be worried if Jason Calaconis steals the Gillmor Gang audience out from under me and sells it to Podtech and GoDaddy for the kids? Stay tuned. I know I will.

I've set up Google Docs to post via the metaweblog api to GestureLab. Unfortunately, the post does not appear, except under Scheduled Entries, where it announces it will appear in 7 hours. Any ideas why? Oddly, the Post timestamp in both this and the errant post are correct, i.e. within 20 minutes of each other. So Cori thinks it might be something going on between the UI and the API.

To compound the confusion, switching the settings dropdown to either Blogger API or MovableTypeAPI and posting to blog produces an indication in GDocs that the post has not been published, while in fact creating a post with no title but that goes live in each case. 

A few nights ago I wrote a quick post on the death of TV. It attracted quite a bit of attention, not Scoble attention, mind you, but quite a bit for something Dave Winer didn't point at. I love the mechanics of this quasi-page view game: lots of well-reasoned arguments with the central thesis, a few chip shots, and some comments that just take off from the premise and run or float away with it. All in all, a good day's grazing in GoogleReader and WordPress. It helped immensely that Robert Anderson somehow fooled WordPress into accepting Akismet, which staunched the increased flow of spam comments to a trickle and then a complete halt. Wow, Matt.

Talking last night with Jason Calacanis and Mike Arrington at a fine steak place in Palo Alto, I tried to listen as these two media gladiators raked over the coals of the day's and week's issues. Gratifying as it was to see that a great deal of the discussion resonated through and around the recent Gillmor Gangcasts, it was even more welcome to see Calacanis continuing to contribute so much of his street and Web smarts to Arrington and even to me, who of course has nothing to learn from these kids. Note: when I talk about the stupid blogosphere, I mean me.

Someone called me a genius for inviting Jason on the Gang. In fact, he invited himself, and by the time he did so, I knew enough about his heart to say sure. I think what the commenter was implying was that I was taking a risk in being overwhelmed by Jason's energy and ego. No matter, Arrington is just as much of a hand full; the little "secret" of the Gang is that everybody at the table is full of themselves, some like Farber and Vizard a bit more elegantly, some like Doc and Udell (when he was on the show) more contributory to the community and therefore inoculated from the requirement to explain their self-confidence. Parenthetically, some of my favorite Udell moments from the early shows were those where Jon let down his hair a little and joined, however briefly, the bitchy vendor sports game with a little of his well-concealed attitude. Getting Udell to laugh at something snarky remains one of the great joys.

At dinner, Jason was giving Mike advice on his business and opportunity. Mike asked me why I was reading all these books on the '60s. Simple, I told him: we're seeing a renaissance similar to that one, where the arc of experimentation, youth, ego, sex, and money gave way to the constant change, the evolution as Jason called it, of those artists. The book I've been working through recently, Bob Spitz' The Beatles, grinds relentlessly through the familiar (to me) story, adding layer of rhythm, pathetic floundering, and missed opportunities upon layer, to the point where you look back and suddenly remember how miraculous it was that they accomplished anything, let alone the breadth of their work.

Almost without announcing their arrival, gestures have taken hold. We walked for a mile or so after dinner, Jason and Mike smoking some well-traveled cigars while I got a contact high in tow. I enjoyed staying a step behind these two, Arrington feeling his way through the moment, Calacanis relaxing in the comfort of his celebrity and talent. In Mike's new car on the way back to his house, he talked about the thrill he still felt to be one of the Gang. A gracious comment, not meant as a compliment but something more intimate. Not friendship either although i doubt either of us would put up with the other's shit if not for liking each other.

I feel relieved now that TV is dead. Tonight I turned the set on only to clear deadwood away, not to record shows I would watch but those I'll sample and skip. HDTV performs a similar function, revealing in exquisite detail just why I don't care about most of today's material. I surreptitiously filmed Dylan last week with Furrier's HD Xacti, capturing him looming sideways over his keyboard like some dark Mozart cowboy. I showed Mike and Jason a taste, Mike the tiny figures in a stable wide shot and Jason the closeup. I don't remember which song I filmed, something from Modern Times, but not the pre-encore closer the thrilling big band Summer Days Summer Nights from Love and Theft — I wanted to be there, not trapped as a cameraman.

Dylan is the evidence that the past continues to be reinvented. Ask the Ninja is the proof that, well, ZeFrank may be funny, but so what. At dinner tonight my five year old Ella told her mother that we watched the Beatles last night on TV — "they were up on the roof." It was Lennon singing gibberish on the second verse of Don't Let Me Down. It was YouTube, the greatest show on earth. The quality sucked, a little video tear in the transfer, Ella could care less. She saw The Beatles last night.

I told Mike a funky little thing Richard Manuel used to say. He heard it the first time but didn't quite. I told him the surround, the stuff that Richard mashed together. Mike said it again, the words cascading out of his mouth. And it was good.

Sexy Sadie, what have you done? You made a fool of everyone.

John Lennon/George Harrison '68

YouTube, Digg, and MySpace took out TV a few months back, and now the corpse is sitting up and taking notice. Latest evidence is the incipient obliteration of Studio 60, the West Wing sequel which is terrific and therefore doomed, in favor of 30 Rock, which is not and therefore not. At least we don't have to go through Commander in Chief clones one after the other, but at the same time.

But that's not why TV is dead. TV is dead because of the Internet. TV is dead because we don't have time for it. TV is dead because the computer lives. TV is dead because of the stupid blogosphere, the so-called "new" medium of podcasting, TiVo, RSS, and HDTV. TV is dead because TV now sucks more than all of the previous.

I watched Scoble's video of Cisco's amazing videoconferencing teledesk, or whatever they called it. The best part was when Robert zoomed in on Mike Vizard and the quality never turned to shit, even though Mike was in NY. It reminded me of the Haunted House ride at Disneyland, where you could peer into the banquet room and watch the ghosts cavort with the 3D heads as you moved around them. The first Star Wars movie rendered a 3D projection of ObiWan or somebody in similar delight at crossing the time barrier.

That's what this is about, tricking time, teleporting yourself across the country. We all wish Doc could actually enjoy his new house instead of rocketing off to Berkman one week a month. I could imagine the Gillmor Gang using the TelePort room from time to time. Remember that the next OS/X enables recording of iSight cons. It's on the way.

Meanwhile TV is dead. The kids still argue over carving out enough time to watch Heroes, the only consensus family show left alive. At the movies over the weekend (imagine a comedian becomes President, not the bonehead we'd be laughing at if we weren't so damned angry) they ran a preview trailer for Children of Men, where humans have lost the ability to reproduce. TV has lost that ability.

I like Grey's Anatomy and Studio 60. Heroes is fun with the family. We're all semi-addicted to All My CHildren, but in recent months I opt for synopses from those who stay vigilant. I fast-forward through the news. Meet the Press and Stephanopoulus are time-shifted to podcast and then mostly discarded. Cable shows: Huff was cancelled, Sopranos is about to drop, The Wire is good but is stacking up, Entourage I finally deleted all to clear space for the new season, and now I've whittled the new season down to Grey's Anatomy and Studio 60 and Letterman and the Scottish guy.

Hollywood Video put the penultimate nail in the coffin with its Premium service, a knockoff of Netflix where you rotate 3 unlimited movies without late fees for 30 bucks a month. Goodbye cable. Goodbye broadcast. Goodbye blockbusters. Goodbye Studio 60. Aggregated to death.

The only good news: just what it was like in February '64. 

from Jonathan Schwartz' blogroll.

Nick Carr gets perilously close to jumping his own shark when he asks when does free get predatory. I knew he could go there some months ago when he listed Google as merely a disruptor of "real" platformers such as Microsoft and Apple. Perhaps Nick has a bit of an Innovator's Chasm he's having difficulty crossing in the bust out of the YouTube Economy. It must feel good and quietly unsettling to have Ballmer and Parsons as bunk mates in these turbulent waters.

Adam Curry makes the point on yesterday's recording of the Gillmor Gang that we are not media experts. I left it alone during the show, as Calaconis and Arrington held their own quite nicely, but that doesn't mean I had nothing to say. As Carr will discover, the fundamentals behind the YouTube snowball accommodate not just Google, but the economy of gestures. Digg and MySpace had as much to do with the YouTube buyout (listen to the show when it ships to understand what I mean by that phrase) as any antitrust-triggering power curve.

Google seems headed in precisely the opposite direction as Microsoft. In recent weeks, I've been invited down to not just receive briefings but actually participate in the fine-tuning of features in Google Reader and the Docs/Spreadsheet mashup. Suggestions have been coded into the software in the interim. API promises have been irrevocably tendered, and the two-way dialogue seems impossible to recork. Trust me, this is behavior I've never seen, from Microsoft or Lotus (who I essentially blackmailed into bug fixes in the Notes 4.5 era on the backs of an Information Week Labs review I held over them.)

What Google seems to value is authority, not the store-bought kind but the transparent kind. These early looks were under NDA embargo, so there was no carrot in terms of scoops (not that I give a shit about scoops.) The lunch provided was nothing special (or nothing more special than what every Google employee receives.) But what they don't provide in schwag or exclusive access they do provide in confidence, confidence that they have the goods and the willingness to listen and adapt. Their adaptability in fact is the single most devastating threat to Microsoft and others, and is what may well be triggering the counterattack by Nick and Steve so early. Waving the antitrust flag is a profound gesture of weakness.

That doesn't mean the tool won't be effective as a rallying point for the competition. But who is the competition here? Yahoo? I think not. As YouTube rolls up television, Yahoo becomes more of a partner than a competitor. A more RSS-controlled TV Guide provides additional inventory for Yahoo to hang communities of interest around the survivors in the content compression that is now underway. The Beck concert and original video are Yahoo's future as a studio — as with all the Office 2.0 startups on display last week, Yahoo's best opportunity is to go vertical with its not-so-micro communities by slipstreaming behind the Yoogle APIs.

Same for Fox: I'll gladly eat a widget today that adds functionality to my Google apps and pay for it Tuesday with the credits I've earned by narrowcasting my gestures. The cutoff threats by Parsons and NBC may move the needle on Wall Street, but they bounce emptily off us users, who just don't watch the shows they can't get in the new TV. And watch out if your thick client (I use the term semi-disparagingly instead of rich, but they're interchangeable) doesn't support the Mac. I missed Fox's Justice (a guilty pleasure) due to a power failure and couldn't get it to work on the Netstream. NBC shows require my Tablet, which has been dust-catching for months since I got a MacBook Pro.

Remember: it's not the ability to watch a missed show on the Net that counts, it's the ability to watch enough of it to click away and never come back. In the Yoogle universe, it's negative gestures that carve out the most useful real estate. My entertainment partners are Jobs (iPod for Grey's Anatomy in a pinch) and CBS (made the key deal on the day of the buyout and provided streaming of Big Brother whenever CBS SF preempted it for a stupid football game) and BitTorrent so I can ALWAYS get Studio 60 no matter what happens and Bill Carter and other TV insiders for signalling when good or cusp shows like Kidnapped get cancelled so I can boot them off my DVR backlog to clear space. And of course, Yoogle for its rollup of Comedy Central, cable news, sports, and that's all folks.

On the Gang, most of the media experts agree that Google will own an operating system within two years. Interestingly, Farber and I disagree. Farber for reasons you can listen to, me because why buy the milk when the cow is free? Besides, if Curry and Calaconis and Vizard are right, I'll be able to afford the sushi dinners I've bet, because that will mean that Nick and Steve's Justice Department daydream will have been cancelled in favor of a Department of Gestures.

I was talking to Jeff Clavier last night. He was just dropping in to say hi to his friend Ismael Ghalimi, the brains behind the Office 2.0 conference. What struck me was Jeff's story of how Ismael went from a standing start to a full-blown conference in a year. The event thus represents his deep dive into the area loosely defined as Office 2.0, a kind of roll up of a hunch that lead to a rigorous exploration and resulted in a surprisingly efficient engine for teasing out the New Office dynamics.

As I mentioned yesterday, there has been a bit too much of the Office 2.0 dialectic — does offline matter, what about IT resistance, broadband glitches, and gorilla dodging. But ignoring that, which became easier mid-yesterday when people got bored with the meta discussion Office 2.0? and started to drill into opportunity.

Even the breakouts, a format I personally hate because of its fragmentation and siloing of "tracks", bore fruit. Most personal and yet compelling on an enterprise level was a frank admission by IBM's Bob Sutor, a tenacious operative in the IBM/Microsoft/Sun WS-I wars, that IBM's heavy handed standards play ran into a buzzsaw from Tim Berners Lee around ownership of contributed technology. The net: "we lost." The meta message: we deserved to.

It was a casual message, delivered not with pride or regret, but simple grace, from a tough customer who has deeply matured. I went up to him and buried a 5 year hatchet, grateful that I was in the room when an answer to an attendee question coaxed out this remarkable transformation. David Berlind encouraged me months ago to ease up and open a dialogue, but it was this serendipity that closed the loop and gave me the understanding that Berlind, and not me, was right.

Another format I despise, the 5 minute demo cattle call, led ably but reduntantly by Mike Arrington, also exceeded expectations. Perhaps it was Arrington's Darwinian m.o. or his quick switch from only his followup questions to audience participation that improved the dialogue, but the speed tended to cull the common features and accentuate the range and vertical properties of the various startups. Major vendors were neither cited nor fretted about. Some of the tools were used to create the conference site, organize an adhoc group of bloggers who pulled the conference enterprise focus together, even aggregate and share accounting metadata contributed by small businesses in order to see how they stack up.

Oddly, many of these tools promise deep integration with blog posting but don't actually make it a click away. Wordpress developers should take note: the enterprise mindset of these startups leaves blog (meida) integration on the table, an artifact perhaps of the naive view expressed by one panelist that blogs are one-dimensional or that the other basic trend of Wikis-are-for-business is the end of the story. And the lack of focus on supporting not just Office 1.0 formats but Google Office will prove fatal for many of these clever plays. Having domain expertise will only last as a barrier to entry until Google rationalizes its API subsystem. 6 months maximum.

It feels good to underestimate somebody or some group or an event with the millstone of Office 2.0 branding. But Ismael's centered confidence in what he has discovered both in terms of focus and community has birthed a formidable model that sits comfortably along the conference/unconference fault line with few of the defects of either extreme. Thanks to Dan Farber for intuiting this and pushing me to show up.

Thanks to Dan Farber's intersession, I received a pass to the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. With Ray Lane's words still ringing from the Salesforce media lunch on Monday (lots of dead men walking), I arrived too late to catch Dan's conversation with Esther Dyson but did hear Andrew McAfee deliver a well-researched runthrough of the world from IT's perspective. Net: we're info-hoarders at heart, IT will resist at all costs, no workflow built in, don't worry, people move slowly and only when there's a 10x or better improvement.

It's a safe story, and as wrongheaded as it is accepted as value in today's post-Microsoft world. Even at Google, there is a defensive posture of "this stuff is at best for small business, we're not attacking Office, yadda yadda yadda." It took me an additional half an hour after my media peers left a luncheon to rollout Google Office (Google Docs and Spreadsheets) yesterday to get the core team aligned around the actual dynamic of the New Office.

Here's the takeaway I doubt we'll get from any of this conference:

• Office is Dead
• Google is within 6 weeks of establishing IM linkage across most of their Office apps.
• The only oxygen in the system left uncaptured by Google is the vertical stack. Every one of the startups/vendors in this room and lurking sphere-style can only survive and perhaps accelerate by leveraging verticals as a mechanism for micro-community economics.
• Office is Dead, long live Google.

Watch the body language around the Google guys and you'll pick up the real message. It's reminscent of the moment many years ago when Windows NT took root in the corporate counterculture. Savor that phrase — it's the underlying driver of this transformation. The Boomers are driving this bus, and no amount of conservative bullshit will slow this express. While HBS consultants preach the policies of a broadcast trickle-down Grandma ease of use mantra, the high-value micro communities are already formed, have been up and running for months, and are scraping away value from corporations and transplanting them in Third Life salons.

Before the NT moment, Netware was Office. You could string all the reasons why it was an insurmountable fortress end to end and circle the moon, but it all crumbled when TCP IP eviscerated the Novell architecture from below. WIndows for Workgroups was the trojan horse in those days, and Gmail is the trojan horse today. When I ask the question at conferences (for the last year and a half) the number of Gmail users in the crowd regularly exceeds 75%, moving toward 95% in recent weeks.

Not that folks like Doc Searls aren't frozen like some prehistoric dog in Eudora, or that most coprorates are chained in Notes or Exchange. But every new layoff or M&A triggers counter-accounts in Gmail. Gtalk becomes the transport for out-of-band point-to-point conversations, Gcal and GDocs/Spread become the workflow engine, and (soon) GDocs/Greader become the high-value info transport for XML data objects — and most crucially — meta data exchange, aka gestures/attention.

The corporate countercultureists will do will to ignore the baiting tactics of the desktop luddites. Om Malik just tossed a bone to the conservatives (he's the Man) and Shel Israel advised not to approach the set-in-their ways crowd. Countercultureists are apologetic on the panel, but like Mike Arrington, don't need to be. It's a vestigial stutter that will fade within a few months. 

and gets reamed for his trouble. But he gets a good post out of it, and that's something. Something really good, in fact. Because most of this new Blogosphere 2.0 is just crap. Well designed, timely, Seth Godinesque, crapola. Even, or especially, this post.

Arrington is at his best when he puts one sentence in front of the other. Here he is at his best. Here he is not reporting, not a journalist, not a blogger, not a mainstreamer, he's Mike Arrington, walking tall and carrying a big stick. I'm amazed the sponsors weren't all over him. After all, they spent a lot of someone's mainstream money to get him there and push him into the Coliseum. They bought and paid for what they wanted: red meat and a good show.

Normally I would defend Staci and Jeff and the rest, terrific journalists all. In fact, Staci and Rafat have created the most incredibly mainstream product from day one by owning the story of media reboot. Nobody else, not Om or The Times or Rolling Stone, nobody owns that beat like paidcontent. The name shouts out the audacious challenge. I don't care how they make their money, how they do their reporting, any of it. It's consistently a great product with important information about a story that keeps growing in implication and authority.

But nobody has got the high ground on journalism right now, if they ever did, and the storm that results from these "showdowns" does little to prove anything except the ease with which a Mike Arrington can put one sentence in front of the other and inflame journalists who damn well should be inflamed. Because they do a remarkably shitty job of communicating the so-called value of their product as in any way superior to the best of whatever anybody with a computer can muster.

Forget superior for a second, and look at what happened when music rebooted in the Sixties. Were The Beatles superior to Sinatra? Coltrane to Armstrong? Dylan to Guthrie? Did they boo Dylan? Yes they did. Now we see that as the watershed of the era. Was this a problem? Listen to the newly-discovered tape of Dylan with Butterfield's band at Newport and it's stunning in its obvious power. They were booing because they were insulted, scared, angry, moved.

I am moved by Arrington's story. God knows I could care less about all this page view Web 2.0 shit that he's leading, but when he doubts himself and suggests even briefly that he should prepare better for a next time, I say no fucking way. Prepare better for what? It's like Hendrix dialing back the funk or Miles apologizing for standing with his back to the audience or any of you out there settling for the pathetic crap that floods the blogosphere or the so-called mainstream media. It's hard to cut through the noise; it's simple but dangerous to make enemies. In an interrupt-driven media world, where "bloggers" and "journalists" compete head to head on every story, it's one big race for class president going on here.

The New York Times is a great publication on its good days, a lying pack of self-protective weasels on others. Same for every one of us in the blogosphere. When I see Arrington filibuster on the floor of the Senate, I see one of us out there making a fool, and us proud, of himself. Suck it up, mainstream media. Next time it's your turn. Something is going on here and we do know what it is.

Doc tells newspapers to open their archives (good idea) and link into everything (not a good idea.) Post-dating links makes sense in the vanilla world of perfect page rank, click integrity, and other fantasy worlds I would call Third Life, the one after the one I haven't got time for.

Dan and David toss the Attention Gang (Dan's coin) around and suggest that the key is big player adoption and aligning Identiy and Attention Gangs. OK, fellows, I get it. Over 3 billion served. Quantity is the goal. Traction is a metric best realized by market force meeting a good story.

Dan does point out that our tilting at windmills is the stuff of revolutions. Have I made clear what the verdict is? Good.

What is happening in Gestureville is the pooling of clicks, lack of clicks, trqansparent gestures, opaque gestures, black hole discovery, and so on. Denise Howell does a good job of channeling what, if not why or why we care, I said. Between Doc, Dan, David, and Denise, I am triangulating what is really going on here. Suddenly I'm elated, in a bizarre goony hostile sort of way.

Let me try to explain (for myself as much as anybody.) This moment is not about turning the corner, inverting the network, putting users back (or newly) in charge. We are in charge, have been all along. The various tools and services we employ to enrich our brains produce varying degrees of efficiency. While we do this, we emit gestures that contain high-value signals of our interest, instincts about future interest, intent, opinion, and other filter drivers.

As I've been bouncing arounf Google Reader, from river of news to email hunt and click to vanity trolling, andso on, I'm generating powerful streams of gestures that can be recorded and mined as signatures — a macro language of the quality of efficiency. In additional words, the signature channel has its own unique value, above and beyond the "success" or lack of it. For a few hours, I've been semi-consciously moving through different patterns and noting (only parenthetically as observation here in this post) what propells me to make a change from one mode to another.

As I do this, ideas surface around interface design, not how to do things well, but how to allow repetition, returning to posts, recording not just read/unread but read/unread/read, keyboard patterns, irritation in navigation, what a good post feels like in observing how it is consumed, and so on. If you think I'm talking about complicated, low investment return rocket science, I'm really not. I'm just stuttering on the notion that the signatures of gestures are perhaps as or more valuable than the actual data. Meta meta data I guess.

Writing like this, as a methodology fro coaxing out value from a brain ODed on pragmatics, is enjoyable. I will be inerested to see how or if it resonates beyond just me. 

Gesturemania is showing sure signs of breaking out. The last few days have brought a flurry of attention (cough) about an attention specification, Kim Cameron's gesture grokking as channeled by Doc Searls, and the entrance of Google Reader into the RSS attention commons. Immersed as I've been with Robert Anderson in preparing GestureBank for the step we'll be taking on Wednesday at an AttentionTrust event in San Francisco, these datapoints (cough) reinforce the moves we are about to make.

As I announced briefly on the September 22nd edition of The Gillmor Gang, I have returned to AttentionTrust.org, the non-profit I co founded with Seth Goldstein, as board director and President. I resigned some months ago in the wake of Omidyar Network's funding of the Trust, and set about creating GestureBank and its open pool of anonymous attention data. Now, with GestureBank architecture in place and growing public awareness of the power of the open pool under user control, it's time for action.

From the first moment Dave Sifry and I created the fundamentals of Attention.xml — who, what, and for how long — a variety of individuals, startups, and observers have attempted to understand, capture, hitchhike alongside, and redirect the notion that what we do is ours to control. Over and over, the question: How can we convince ____ to give us back our data? That question is fundamentally irrelevant. It is a copy of our data at best that they hold, at their peril.

Better and more precise minds than mine have understood the value of attention long before I stumbled into it. Michael Goldhaber first wrote about it for Esther Dyson. John Battelle connected his Database of Intentions to search dynamics much the way that Brian Epstein connected the dots when the Beatles' recording with Tony Sheridan signalled the coming wave that overflowed out of Hamburg and the Cavern basement, and turned it into Beatlemania.

But what Sifry and I fashioned was simple enough not to be argued on its merits. Instead, FUD was brewed around the people: oh, this is a proprietary specification because Technorati is behind it. Oh, Gillmor is a journalist so he doesn't know what he's doing, or, as Mitch Kapor said when I interviewed him for the Release 1.0 report on Attention, that this was all so much hand waving. Perhaps it was, perhaps it still is, but every day the number of wavers grows and the doubts evaporate. It's been a learning experience for me too; I'm not unconfident about my instincts, but it's taken collaboration with people such as Seth Goldstein and Robert Anderson and Doc Searls and Dan Farber and, you know the list, to realize that perhaps my commitment to the music of the idea has served to propel it forward much more efficiently than the usual suspects' standards bodies and market land grabs and community flag waving can engender.

Time and again, my peers remind me of what it is that we've been doing here. When AOL's data leak broke out, Trust board director Mary Hodder wrote a stunningly precise and powerful analysis of the situation that led to a description of the value of the GestureBank open pool that not only had I never discussed with her but was only just coming to the realization that this is why I had risked alienating Goldstein, Hank Barry, and the rest of the Trust by apparently bailing on them to follow a poorly defined muse.

But over and over again, these people, and the folks who populate the Gang, and the listeners and readers who put up with my pathetic personal meanderings and Rodney-esque complaints, remind me in the subtlest and yes, most obnoxious ways how important this journey we're on remains. The continued criticism about how I produce the Gang serves as much to punctuate how valuable the conversation is as it does to annoy me. And when, as Jason Calaconis does on this week's edition, he tells us that he would show up even if the show wasn't being recorded, he shows what the stakes here really are.

Predicting the future is made easier by imagining what will happen, and more importantly, what won't. Try as I might, I can't see gestures as anything but the most efficient product of the near future. Every existing model inevitably crumbles alongside our innate ability to detect bullshit, irrelevance, and the possibility of a better life for us and our beloveds. It's Darwinian in force: let's see, if I'm going to dead Thursday, I better eat that burger today. Even better, as Professor Corey states (loosely) borrow the money so you won't ever have to pay for it. Or in Wimpyspeak, "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

Or, in attentionspeak, I'll gladly tell you today what I want instead of sifting through reams of crap that you randomly hurl at millions of apparent me's looking for a bite. It's not, "Tell me what you know," it's "Tell me you don't know anything so I can move on to the next idiot." I bet you're thinking I'm the idiot for telling you you don't know anything, but I'm talking about last night's audience. Do we know why that's funny when Letterman (Carson) says that? Because he's telling that joke to the same audience as last night's; he's taping two shows in a row so he can get away early for the weekend.

So if you laugh at that joke, you're laughing at yourself, and that means you're in on the joke. SO I guess we're not such amateurs now are we. Gestures are about the transition from

• We are the audience… to
• We are the producer (user-generated media)… to
• We are what we eat (gesture-incented media)

Again, imagine the possible futures: Do we subscribe to a magazine/site/feed about gossip written by

• gossip columnists
• our neighbors, or
• the celebrities themselves?

My guess: The magazine that delivers all three, the gossip columnist who becomes the celebrity (Murray the K), the neighbor who dishes the dirt funny (comedians), and the celebrity themselves (Jason Calaconis.) Look deeper, and all these are gesturers, bubbling up as an affinity group with a micro-community's innate power of self-selection and efficiency. The most efficient product wins. Now try and imagine a competitor. If you can, then go get some VC money quick, or borrow it from an old relative.

In the Gesture Economy, we're taking no prisoners, because we don't get out of this alive. But our dreams do, and god willing, our children.

The thought that podcasting needs a name change is right up there with the idea that Adam Curry put forward that breaking Gillmor Gang up into pieces was holding it hostage. In the rush to formalize the "best practices" of rebooted media, it is laughable that any of us have even the remotest clue about what is the right way to do any of this. I can remember clearly Doug Kaye and I reviewing download metrics about the IT Conversations Gillmor Gang and noting first with bemused interest and later with 20-20 hindsight that we were seeing the first outlines of what became podcasting.

Here's my point: We're all making this up as we go along. Someday we'll look back on this and realize that each breadcrumb adds up to a loaf of bread that we'll agree or disagree to call Chocolate Upside Down Layer Cast, and someone will make money of it or not, and all that will have absolutely nothing to do with what is really going on here, which is this wonderful experiment where atoms collide to create moments of time that can be treasured, discarded, downloaded, uploaded, streamed sideways or sequentially, serially or comically, whatever you want, free only a dollar.

iPlodius.com is up for renewal in 15 days, and for the life of me I don't know why I should do so, or even why I registered it in the first place. Mostly it is because it tickled my fancy, allowed me to imagine a character who spoke in short bursts, pontificated in shorthand, got in, got out, all with the thin veneer of Roman soap opera and trademark violation. The more I breathe life back into the old bastard, the closer I get to reupping. Et tu, Stoweboydius?

Veni vidi wiki: I came, I saw, I left some stuff.

-iPlodius 

When Dave Winer says the hard part is getting enough adoption to achieve a critical mass, you should listen. If anything has achieved a critical mass, it's RSS. When Doc Searls talks about Vendor Management Systems, or intentions, or whatever, you should listen. If anything has achieved a critical mass, it's the Cluetrainism that markets are conversations.

Why would Dave say that getting adoption is the hard part? Just an observation? A way of rolling up the conversation that's breaking out around what I call gestures, Doc calls VRM or VMS, Dave calls RSS/OPML, Dave says Marc calls PeopleAggregator, etc.? He's talking about fragmentation here, the Invented Here syndrome, the leverage that can translate into market power. Interestingly, Dave identifies that power as being in the hands of the user. For me, that begs the question: If the user is in control, then why is getting adoption hard?

I disagree with Dave. I don't think getting adoption is hard. I think it's easy, is happening, is unstoppable. Perhaps where I disagree with Dave, and Ray Ozzie, and many others, is in defining what is the metric of critical mass. Ray Ozzie described it as optimization, and then placed Microsoft's chips on the notion that more data means more precision, more relevance, more value, more power. The weakness of that strategy is the sulphorous odor that Dave defines as the silo. No matter how much Windows-encircled data is captured, or misappropriated from the unknowing user, it is still defined by the characteristics of the container that envelops the experience.

By definition, the Windows data represents behavior under the terms and conditions of the Windows/Office/DRM/PlaysForSure contract with the user–managed via IT, structured around the corporate hierarchical notions of enterprise ownership of user data and behavior, and so on. And in turn, the same can be said of the Google/Skype/Yahoo/Salesforce contract–different in that users can navigate across corporate domains but remain subtly constrained by, as Doc suggests, the tyranny of inference derived but not related from the user's behavior. Both clouds are captured, prisoners of war in the battle for access to the intentions of the user/creator of these signals.

The critical mass Dave looks for, Ray speaks for, and Doc labors for, can be seen every day in the TechMeme headlines, in congressional hearing rooms, in board rooms, and finally, in our living rooms. It's what my friend calls AttentionGate, and you only have to look into his hurt eyes to understand that the leap of faith in trusting someone–anyone–is often rewarded with treachery. No matter how inured we have become to what Scott McNealy long ago told us to get over, that we are tracked, recorded, sliced and diced within an inch of our souls, by corporations, governments, school boards, the HallMark Card corporation, WalMart, Netflix, General Mills, General Motors, the Little League, the Girl Scouts, the Democrats, RiteAid, and Beck's puppets. I'm sure I've left someone out.

Last night I stood with a thousand hackers in the Yahoo courtyard and enjoyed Beck and his band and his puppets for an hour. I shot some HD video with the camera John Furrier loaned me for the Attention film I'm working on. I was invited by Yahoo's PR company via email. I heard from an unnamed source that Beck was the performer, and received an IM from another person confirming the identity. I've bought a number of Beck records, most happily the first, not so much the next few, and have created little metadata in iTunes about my usage patterns. Two turntables and a microphone I heard on CD for the most part, as it predated the iPod.

I could go on, about taking the TrailBlazer even though the left low beam was out, because it had a full tank of gas, rather than the Chrysler MiniVan because it would take ten minutes more to gas up. Or how my wife fell asleep as I droned on about business shit and we missed the 92 exit and had to cut across Palo Alto on Sand Hill and couldn't get over to the left lane in time and had to double back at Churchill, and even then still got to Yahoo in time to see Chad Dickerson step up to the microphone and tell everybody how he and his team got the idea to get Beck three weeks ago and now, somehow, by hook and by by crook, he was here.

And you could take all that metadata and gas receipts and empty Protein Bar wrappers and bar codes and SD drives and extra batteries and Amazon upsells and proprietary Newsgator synchronization APIs and long tails and short walks of long piers, and still not come up with the simplicity of the gesture Chad and Yahoo and Beck and Doc and Dave and we all give when we wave our hands in the air and thank whoever we damn please for the life we are breathing. That's the critical mass I'm saying.

Google has just pushed a revamp of Google Reader that I will quickly move over to from Rojo. Here's hoping Rojo frees my gesture data from its store. Look for Niall Kennedy's analysis; he and I were briefed on this a few weeks ago, among others I'm sure. And stay tuned for important news from AttentionTrust and GestureBank.

Even for me, the amount of silence I've been generating recently is a bit much. Between the things I can't, shouldn't, or won't talk about, there's not a lot left. I'm hoping to break the logjam over the next few days. The best place for now is The Gillmor Gang, where recent appearances by Jason Calacanis, Gabe Rivera, Robert Anderson, and Sam Whitmore have laid the groundwork for some very exciting developments that I can't wait to share.

But while I wait, I certainly can till the fields in preparation for the coming wave of developments. It's no secret that attention and gestures are accelerating their footprint in the technology conversation. The almost daily data crises from AOL, HP, Facebook, et al are just the tip of the iceberg. Below the waterline, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IAC, and others are shuddering as they see their once-carefree audiences starting to wake up to the dangers–and value–of their behavior. And in turn, the realization that it's not the quantity of their breadcrumbs but the quality of their gestures that increasingly will count.

Is it just me, or do you begin to notice that link free text is starting to look calmer, more conversational? Yes, my trolls, it's just me. But for the rest, do you see what I see? Naturally, my mind travels to a(ny) recent Doc Searls post as the exception that proves the rule. Doc loves links (I used to) and you can see why. Sometimes he peels the onion, then rewraps it with supporting links: look here where I or someone else said this better or first, join me in honoring this great mind, review the most recent conversation nodes, and so on. Why would anyone argue with that great aesthetic? It even makes me feel bad for a second.

But still I proceed. I've been in a biography frenzy for months now–after years of heads-down work, I've quietly set aside the machines and retreated to Dylan, The Band, Cary Grant, Hendrix, and natch, The Beatles. Occasionally I've rationalized it as inspiration or best practices for work–Grant's trail-blazing efforts to carve out an independent career and control of his creative and business landscape are remarkably prescient for this media reboot–but fundamentally I'm reconnecting with the emotions and exhilaration of a simpler sillier time when the world lay open beneath our feet.

The Grant bio, by Marc Eliot, is an eye-opener, not so much for its familiar retelling of the carefully controlled details of the actor's life, but for the persistent attempt to put his actions and relationships in a larger context. It becomes clear early on that the author is convinced of Grant's sexual preference for men, most notably his longtime companion Randolph Scott. In one startling section, Grant marries for the first time and moves from his shared home with Scott. The next day, Scott buys the house next door and moves in.

As the book moves through the decades, the struggles with four (of five) failed marriages, the fascinating detentes with directors including Hawks, Cukor, McCarey, and his most successful professional marriage, Hitchcock, the context emerges of a tough, loyal, fearful, pragmatic artist–a study in motion, not snapshots in time. The book's footnotes serve as gestures to the reader–here is what I found out, and here is why I make these assumptions about the essentially unknowable. The end notes reveal, even twenty years after the actor's death, a retreat into anonymity for those who discussed Grant's sexuality and stonewalling on the part of the FBI regarding Grant's apparent work for intelligence services under the direction of Hoover.

Do the footnotes satisfy? Do links matter? Of course. But the style of the author and even his thesis do not make the book what it is. For me, it's the careful gestures of respect for the fabric of the reading experience that resonate far more than the information (or lack of it) contained within. The footnotes satisfy not because of any additional revelation but more for their sense of coda, that that is what we think we know, now the ball's in your court. Doc's links matter because his style is energized by them, not (for me) because they point at the past and buttress the logic of the proposed future.

Having children has illuminated my childhood in ways I never anticipated. As I sit stroking my daughter's hair as she falls back to sleep after awakening from a bad dream, I am transported to riding in my father's car on the long drive back to Woodstock from the city, my head resting on his lap. I speak softly to my daughter in my father's voice, sharing that sense of safety and family that she will never know from my parents (both long gone) except through me. The past becomes prologue in a visceral, elegant way: I become and am becoming my daughter's father in the resonance of my own childhood.

I have no quarrel with links, just a profound love for the economy of gestures. The package, or container, the channel, the rhythm, the receiver, the quiet of the road not taken, the stepping aside to let the overtones pass through. To be continued.

Mike Arrington stood me up for a Yahoo! Hack Day rub-a-dub. Dana Gardner was on the road at an analyst meeting. Jason, Hugh, Dan, Doc (40 minutes in) and Mike Vizard showed, along with guest Gabe Rivera, who actually spilled some real news. Scoopsters should call hm up and beat me to the punch. I announced some news at the end.

Just finished a Gillmor Daily with Mary Jo Foley, who jumped from Ziff Davis Media to ZDNet blogs. I'd say welcome MJ, but she's been here all along.

Attention politics require a willingness to get down in the mud and slop around with the bottom feeders. The bad news is that, that the quality of the lifestyle sucks. The good news is that the good actors shine brightly, are easily identifiable, and have almost no barrier to cooperation. Just walk up and start talking. In the trustosphere sweepstakes, tin ears clank and distance runners hold natural advantages.

The third rail of attention politics is the user contract. Right now we have pros and little leaguers warming up on the sidelines together, with nothing to separate them but cluefullness about their credibility. It's an amazing sight: Hall of Famers such as Ray Ozzie and Steve Jobs taking batting practice while various insiders trade good-natured barbs around the cage. But while we all peruse Techmeme and RSS for clues and cues, the real action is going on elsewhere.

The battle for Attention is between the venture capitalists and the new media — between Fred Wilson and Mike Arrington, between the people behind Six Apart and and the algorithm behind Gabe Rivera, between publishers and published, the ins and outs. That's the whole ballgame, right there. Call it FOO or Web 2.0 or whatever, it's still VC money controlling. That's the sadness, the genius of baseball. Same 90 feet to home plate, a time machine for the little guy. C'mon big guy, bring it… show us what you got.

When I was young, I read a book called The Kid who Batted One Thousand. Basically, he fouled off every pitch until he got one he was looking for. 9 times out of 10 he walked. That's the user in control. As long as we can dig in our cleats, slap the ball left or right or back, enjoy the repetition, revel in the boredom, learn to wait for our pitch, we are in play.

Facebook — fouled down the line to get the measure of the long ball.

HPGate — worry when they tap Om or Farber.

Digg — just get under it a skosh, back on the net. Cotton candy.

MS/Google — Money can't buy them love.

ExcludoCamp — just hit through the ball, but hard into the visitor's dugout.

I find myself humming Dylan's Nettie Moore… Winter's gone, the rivers on the rise… whack… whack… whock… The world has gone black before my eyes. I like coming to keep from thinking about baseball.

Then, it looms up there like the dusk moon at onset. A big saucer full of now. When you hit this one, you almost don't feel it. Sound, the moment just after the big laugh, blurred motion, hearing between the notes.

For each of us, there is a pitch. Wait for it.

It's looking like the full Gang is in the offing for tomorrow's session. That is, minus Udell, who is busy getting ready for a barnstorm of his Dylanesque never-ending tour of Mexico and several other outposts. But Calacanis says he'll show, and his You Tube post suggests he's re-engaging somewhat. The YouTube myth gets a nice workout under Jason's macroscope, but you knew that given his viral Techmeme clout.

I'll probably let Jason reel out enough rope to drag the YouTube story underwater, which is where it belongs. It's but a subtheme of the Great Widget Wars, where the aggregators control the gateway to what's left of mainstream television (cable, satellite, portals) and the real juice is in the Revenge of the Gesturer. Nick Carr be warned: gestures are back with a vengeance, now that Digg is ripe for scraping attacks, Rojo is sucked into the Trottosphere, and Facebook is getting attention religion.

Doc Searls calls in from Berkmania, gapingvoid from the moors, and Arrington has apparently been located somewhere in his Bermuda 2.0 Triangle. Vizard, fresh from coining VRM and precipitating Denise Howell's Virtual Law Firm (VLF), and Dan Farber, fresh from missing a Gang recording for the first time in months, are on board. I'm looking forward to total silence.

In related news, I've given up on back-tracking the Rojo cloud. The last few times I've torn myself away from The Beatles bio, I've almost immediately foundered on Attention 1.0 "discoveries." Ross Mayfield expertly encapsulates the memetracker dead-end, with support from Gabe (Not Gonna Do It) Rivera, Sam (Gonna Reinvent It) Ruby, and a bunch of other ripples. My absolute favorite: Ev Williams' bulletin about the Death of Page Views. Is that Michael Goldhaber standing by the clock tower waiting for the Delorean or something like it?

I've been loading up a MacBook Pro with all sorts of cool stuff: 2 gigs of RAM, Final Cut Studio, GarageBand with all of the Loop Packs, and the beginnings of a project I'll go public with in a few days. John Furrier of the Valley startup PodTech (the one Scoble is working for) has contributed an HD recorder for starters. Frankly, I thought Scoble was full of shit about HD while shilling for Redmond, but now that I see what it looks like I'm sold. Reminds me of the good old days in LA when the late great Nam June Paik turned me loose with three of the first Sony B&W portapacks and I took my "class" up the hill to Phil Austin's house while the Firesign were writing Bozos.

Speaking of LA, I fly to New York Monday for a week of meetings and pre-production, then on to LA for my father-in-law's 70th birthday get-together. I'll attend the Sun event in NY on Tuesday, and hope to grab a few minutes with Jonathan Schwartz about some of the rumors that are circulating about a major Sun initiative. Paren- and hypo- thetically, I wonder why no one seems to notice how powerful a Sun rollup of YouTube, S3, and virtual gridware could add up to. All this Valleywag garbage about interim is so much smoke from the old priesthood.

Later: Gabe in comments says I'm right 40% of the time, only problem is which 40%. What he doesn't know (how could he) is that I've written extensively some 8 months ago about where we would be today and it isn't 40% right but essentially 100%. Indeed, my work over the past three years has been essentially predictive and instrumental in bringing us to this juncture, where the user in charge has, as Dennis Haarsager says on a Gillmor Daily I'll ship this weekend, "the tools of production in hand." More from New York.

Richard Koman of Tom Foremski's Silicon Valley Watcher quotes the Mercury News on HPGate:

The California Attorney General's office officially launched an investigation into the matter, issuing subpoenas, the Mercury News reports.

`I have no settled view as to whether or not the chairwoman's acts were illegal, but I do think they were colossally stupid,'' Attorney General Bill Lockyer told the Mercury News in an interview. “We'll have to wait until the investigation concludes to determine whether they were felony stupid or not.''

 No matter whether it's a felony or not, it's colossally stupid for sure. HP is just the one we know about this week. Let's call it what it is:  AttentionGate.

Just a note to let you know I'm thinking of you. Recording a Gillmor Daily this afternoon with Dan Farber, and then getting to editing the Gang session we recorded on Tuesday. Doc has a Suitwatch coming up that points at it, so I've promised him it will be largely available tomorrow.

Later today I pick up the camera John Furrier is contributing to the Attention conference effort. There have been a few glitches in our plans, most notably an end around by the FOOsters, but I think we're almost ready to rock. More as thicker skins develop. 

Some chickens may start coming home to roost now that Google is going semi-public with their Office strategy. For starters, can we now agree to stop listening to denials from Eric Schmidt and others about this? Doubt it.

Next, can we start watching more carefully who insists the Google Office strategy doesn't exist? Doubt it. Seems some really credible folks are still clinging to the same old story, insisting that

• it's not a direct competitor
• ad-supported apps won't work
• they'll never catch up
• nobody else could pull it off
• there's no offline solution
• more sand-diving

I especially love the one about how some of us have been subtly changing our stories over the years we've been saying this: Office is dead. Of course, I never meant that literally, or metaphorically, or economically, or strategically. That would be foolish, naive, vengeful, pathetic, and clueless. Watch how we change the argument bit by bit, from Office is Dead to Office is really Dead to Office is commonly recognized as Dead.

The InformationWeek story (Dan Farber points at it) is wonderfully balanced, not by whether or not Microsoft has a prayer of staving this off, but by the way it doles out the shrinking thumb-holds by which Redmond is hanging on to its business model. It's offline, stupid–thats it, the last remaining sandbag holding the water back. Yeah, now that Connexion is dead, nobody will ever think of a way to erase the offline barrier. C'mon guys, let's line up on that one. Or shall we just leave it that surely IT won't let this happen.

Remember Saigon, when everybody started running for the helicopters. Imagine IT guys sitting there, one eye on the helicopters, the other on their management console. Imagine that our guy notices his assistant furtively gathering up his pictures of the family, checking his Blackberry for Gmail under the table, knowing way too much about blogosphere crap, ccing his Gmail account to "take the work home with him," reading documents via HTML, suddenly announcing his wife has updated his calendar about an important Little League game he has to attend, and then, leaving for a job building EC2/S3 apps. Elvis, or in this case the new institutional memory, has left the building.

If IT doesn't matter, who does? The new IT, the user militia? Google's opportunity, and potential cage, is the relevance of the relationship with the user. If GOffice can maintain a contract of profitability with the user, how can Microsoft survive? Increased granularity, behavioral transparency, strategic just-in-time resonance — this is the stuff of which marriages are made. On the flip side, what is the stuff of which the Microsoft divorce is conjured?

• loss of inevitabilty
• fear of the static
• the Yankee fan within

Take the hard ones first: all the vertical apps, the business logic, the entropy-laden tools built of the hairball. This is the domain of Open Office, the decrepit notion that you can wean the child off the nipple with a rubber one. This works right up to the moment the child wants to leap ahead, become the big girl, hold the glass herself. This is the "weakness" of Gspread, that it doesn't run the macros.

How does new IT think about this? Do they see it in their interest to perpetuate the business partner lock-in, the connection back to developers that forms the unspoken back-scratching logic of going where the money is? Sure they do, in a world where Open Office promises options but actually delivers a horse race where Office can be declared the winner by comparison. In effect, Open Office validates Office quality in a vacuum where no improvement is either requested or valued over the existing version.

Open Office is the Washington Generals to Office's Globetrotters. Without them there is no game, no score, no halftime, no metrics of success. Owning 95% of the market means what? In a world of show business, it means blockbuster. In a world of productivity it means incrementally little. What if the major innovation possible with Office is to make it obsolete?

Yeah, that does resonate, now doesn't it. That's the aircraft carrier-sized hole Google is driving through. Remember those vertical apps, the LOB apps, the IP of the company, the stuff that is not commoditized. What if a widget fabric comes along that distributes the building blocks of those apps across the GOffice APIs and primitives. What if the cost of the Microsoft server/client equation is undermined by such a strategy, let's call it Salesforce, why don't we. What if Marc Benioff is the ultimate salesman for the Big Switcheroo?

Wait, you mean Salesforce could be a Google New Deal, with subsidies for the development of a widget framework behind the scenes that, when surfaced as a developer pack for small businesses, provides a suck-and-replace kit for migrating Office LOB apps? Naah, that would be… naah.

Wait a minute, so when IWeek says it will take years to undermine those apps, who are they talking about? Let's look at SAP and their modules–like one of Shai Agassi's favorites, the M&A module. If Salesforce is merely the dev front for Google, an abstraction layer to hide the skeleton of the emerging widget framework, a subsidized (read ad-supported) trending-toward-free LOB service farm, then where do you start first? How about an M&A service where multiple LOB apps are harmonized behind the cloud and then rematerialized as a consistent corporate API-driven fabric built on top of guess what, the Google primitives. Beam me up, Sergey.

Just finished recording the Last Gillmor Gang. Of course, for those who pay attention, I'm calling every show from now on the Last one, under the assumption that one of these days I'll be right. It's another good one, which I'll start mixing in a few hours, and it will spool out in at least 3 or maybe 4 parts. Calacanis couldn't make it, but Arrington started it before disappearing mysteriously, and Hugh Macleod finished it with a long wine commercial masquerading as consulting/brainstorming. Farber, Vizard, Gardner, Doc, and special guest Jeff Clavier round out the session. After two years of this, I'm more happy with the results consistently than at any time since Udell quit.

Yesterday Mitch Kertzman and I chatted for a two-part Gillmor Daily. Some of the discussion overlaps with where the Gang went today, so I'll interleave the release over the weekend.

Something stinks about the AOL firing of its CTO. On its face, it's a simple deal: you snooze you lose. A subordinate screws up, you're both gone. But my gut tells me that AOL is perpetuating the damage, by expressing their inability to process this event in any but a binary you're-gone knee jerk. The data release will probably turn out to be a valuable lesson in the power — and potential misuse — of what eventually will be seen as OUR data.

Meanwhile, it's business as usual for everybody moving forward — including AOL. Just because they've stopped releasing the data doesn't mean they will stop using it for their own purposes. No wonder Eric Schmidt was so adamant about how Google would never allow this to happen — they're a roach motel that counts on that data coming in — and never leaking back out. How they mine that data is their black box, something that they will protect even from the government, not necessarily because of the user's data civil rights, but certainly because of Google's protection of its algorthyms.

Follow the money — said Deep Throat. So if AOL is moving from a dial-up subscription model to a "free" model, then they are moving toward the very m.o. that the CTO got shitcanned for. In other words, she really got fired for exposing the value of data mining to the "free" economy. If this is the new model, then it was particularly bad timing to illustrate for nervous users just what they were paying for "free" apps and services.

Better to cut the meme off before users thought too much about what was being exposed. I wonder what data is being revealed today on AOL's site, and Microsoft Live, and Yahoo, and Google/MySpaces/etc. All that same data, all those revealing queries for how to do illegal stuff, and what we want to know, and who we are looking for, and what times we do that, and what we do next, and what we did just before. You know, the stuff that these engines slice and dice to understand who we are and what we want.

Of course, all that stopped when AOL put the cat back in the bag, and when they fired the CTO we all knew it was just a bad dream. God forbid the inmates had access to this data; let's get it back in the hands of the professionals. Move along — nothing to see here.

Luckily, all that is a big pile of shit, served lukewarm so as not to jump out from the rest of the gruel. And luckily again, that we are slowly but surely learning how to detect flaws in the architecture of participation that is sold to us as freedom in the new Web 2.0h. User generated content, move over. It's user generated behavior that is being sold down the river for 2 tickets to the Mets game and a Gmail client. What we need is a little cash register ka-ching sound layered into every click, to remind us that we could use a little piece of that. 

A strange toboggan ride this week. Strapped in to the cockpit was the resolute Nick Carr, ready to do battle once more against the arrayed gigolos of blogdom. Like a Commodore Perry wiping the grit from his goggles, Our Nick lay ready in wait for the nincompoops of the net.

It wasn't always like this, you know. There once was a time, back in the murky Hard Drive of History, before WikiPedia and Calacanis, when men were men and women were willing to put up with it. Back then, a job was worth having; school was for dummies, not punishment. Back then, there was a back then. Now, nothing — no distinction, class, ivory or otherwise tower — just the dull thump of mortar rounds from the proletariat into the forward positions.

Who is this Arrington to question the assholity of Our Nick? The boy has balls, Nick admitted. In truth, if Nick would let himself go there, he saw more of himself than he cared to ignore. Arrington represented that most annoying characteristic of the Super Right, the ability to believe totally in oneself with not a shred of supporting evidence. Web 2.0, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy — all convenient lies that bound the essential truth in a glow of inevitability deserving of the Patron Elite.

Our Nick slowly released the hand brake, marveling at the efficient design, the simple perfection of the mission, the apparently endless run-on of metaphors trailing from his muscular thighs. Time to put the bums in their place. So what if they were too ignorant to know it, too drunk with their own integrity to understand the futility of the Permanent Poor. The irony, as always was inescapable yet oddly wasted on these fuckheads, pinboys, wackers, comic book sharing towheads from the darkness beyond the Aware.

For in truth Our Nick was Good. Pure, wrong, but good. Armed with the obvious, cloaked in the inevitability of entropy, propelled by the Magic of Rabbit Pulled from Hat, the glint of insight rendered in gun metal against the dawn of resignation and boredom. Good, though. That which infuriated the most: Our Troll. The A-Troll.

The stream of information into my inforouter has reached an unmanagable level of overflow. This is bad news, forcing me into TechMeme, Scripting News, Valleywag, and Between the Lines as a triage strategy to become acceptably uninformed. However, this is good news, because the collapse of the inforouter paves the way for application strategies under direction of the user in charge.

Faced with some 1500 unread items in Rojo, spread across two rivers of news, I have now reached the point where, several years ago, I abandoned NetNewsWire. As the threshold crosses 400 items, I have to checkerboard between the two streams 100 items at a time. If the phone or email doesn't interrupt within 20 minutes, I may be able to descend to the next level. Without a solid block of time (at least 2 hours) I can't clear enough to ever catch up without resorting to some other scenario.

This is the same wall I hit with the New York Times and Wall Street Journal in print and then online some 18 and 6 months ago respectively. The resolution: I rely mostly on Peter O'Kelly's triage in the tech space; the Arts content is mostly lost. Google alerts on Beatles and West Wing sustain me for now. Taking that history as instructive, I would predict more alerts to cherry pick the Blogosphere spillover. Given the relatively high volume of citation of Gillmor and Gillmor Gang these days, that alert has kept the lions at bay to some extent.

Those who read between and beyond the no linking and xxx is dead themes may see that alerts are becoming a more and more fundamental gesture, both in how they suck the marrow out of the infostream and even more strategically, how they are perceived and folded into social contracts with the user in charge. Just as Engadget's 7 million page views offers a vision of the micromedia, so too does it presage the microglut that arrives within minutes of that success. How do we deal with increasingly alert-driven streams to maintain discoverability, context, and a sense of empowerment. Systems that fail that test will be discarded as quickly as I am flushed out of Rojo and into… what?

This is the moment where the commercial begins in the current model. Demo, discussion, denunciation, distraction — all tools of the trade, and to some significant extent deprecated in this next phase. What happens when Arrington, Malik, Wilson, and MacLeod hit the network with equally authoritative takes? For one, the silence of accelerated consensus a la the Gang wins over the individual endpoints. For another, the ahead-of-the-curve proposition becomes increasingly valuable. Watch Calacanis, the lightning rod. Watch Mernit, the synthesist. Watch the micromemes emerge from the boredom and ennui of the RSS rush hour.

These are the early stage gesturers; the W.C. Fields cigar boxes being juggled while the core stream is delivered as "entertainment." These folks have the goods, they know it, and those executives who pretend they don't are in for a rough ride. I'll repeat that: We have the control, and we know it. No amount of slime or power politics will stop this. As Doc says, we're still throwing tea into Boston Harbor 200+ years later. And if you're not with us, get the hell out of the way. We wish you no ill will — well, nothing significant — but don't get between the mama bear and her cubs.

Digg sucks because it uses the page view model as its engine. The headlines are designed to attract: something about lossless iTunes audio pulls me in but then the payoff is that hard drive size will encourage larger hard drives. How about a headline that discourages clicking: iTunes lossless audio coming; not soon enough. Then: The truth about the RIAA. Immediate reaction — not gonna go for it. The caption reads:

Some very interesting information on the RIAA and their practices.

Thanks. The digital equivalent of "check it out, check it out." Still no, now even more emphatic no.

But since I'm writing this, I'll go for it just to report back… Feh. Some 1999 quotes by Hank Barry, facts that money from RIAA legistlation doesn't go to artists, 30 second read. Certainly not worth clicking. Net: the most valuable extra information not provided as per page viwe model is source of the page, Boycott-RIAA.com.

But wait, here's the exception that proves the rule: the headline sucks

"Zoom" the Movie Gets 0% on Rotten Tomatoes

but not the caption:

Looks like the new movie with Tim Allen is worse than we thought. There have been 20 reviews counted so far and none of them have been good. But what could we expect, this was the director who brought us "Garfield" and "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey".

Good for us, not so good for page view models. All I need to know, thank you, next. And timely too; almost went to that instead of World Trade Center the other night.

Today's recording of the Gillmor Gang produced some mixed feelings. On the one hand, it was nice to hear from Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis, or as someone put it Calacarrington, light-sabering with each other. I'm grateful for their interest in being on the show, though Jason's bailout at the hour mark to do an interview with the Washington Post struck me as the right thing to do for him and AOL but not for the show. I semi-joked about firing him, but as with all jokes there's a real element of truth.

Arrington seemed irritated that I had written about what he considered a private conversation about another Washington Post reporter, but then he went far beyond me in explaining what he felt about the transaction. And that's what these intersections between "old" and "new" media seem to be: transactions. Both Calaconis and Arrington are experts at this form of transparency; the mainstreamers have some catching up to do.

No one is immune to this dance, certainly not me. I've been milking the lack of specifics about my move off ZDNet and the turmoil around the Gang, but behind the marketing and brand maintenance lie some real issues, some of which I can't discuss except by indirection. Some of the problems stem from the incredible and unanticipated success of Attention and Gestures. The dynamics of the show have vacillated wildly as outside events validate the work and principles of the AttentionTrust, GestureBank's open pool, the revolution that is the user in charge.
The AOL data dump, the Ozzie Live speech, Jason's Digg market-making Gesture gambit–they're all of a piece. Reading Joshua Porter's hat-tip to Jason's brilliant mashup of street smarts and ear-to-the-train-tracker instincts, I pull up short when he describes the Gang as cynical. This really stings. Not because I don't know what he's talking about, but because he betrays his lack of respect for what I'm trying to do here. It makes me want to crawl up in a little ball and quit. Is that all he gets out of this? Of course, he's right. I'm wasting my time.

I can't tell you how lucky I am to be in the same room with these wonderful people. I won't pretend that I don't belong there; of course I do. But that is not enough to let things just careen forward. This past week, the show was taken off of Sirius. In the wake of Arrington's resignation, I had decided to shut down the show and relaunch it under a new name. When Mike and I worked out the differences that had bubbled up on the show in question — you can clearly hear me baiting him into quitting, and despite what our demeanor suggests on the show, we are really good friends — the decision to resume the show as it stood was met with some bewilderment. The Sirius cancellation resulted.

If Joshua's lack of respect stings, you can imagine how the Sirius move feels. To be blunt, the Gang on Sirius is one of the best shows on that network. Forget about how I feel about it; what it says about my partners in the Gang is just fucking unforgivable. Doc Searls is one of the most important voices of our time, and reducing even for a minute the reach of that sound is just plain dumb. Dana Gardner, who sat with Mike Vizard and me in a bar at Comdex 4 years ago and dreamed up what became the Gang, and recently literally jumped off this cliff we're building without a parachute. Vizard, who leant his industry clout to the show from Day One and sent a signal to the right people that something important might be happening. Jon Udell, without whose weekly (now monthly) phone calls there never would have been the conversations we now routinely share. Dan Farber, you know what I, and everybody in the business, thinks about this guy. Arrington, Calacanis, lately Hugh MacLeod — each and every one of these guys can carry the weight by themselves.

The session today started slowly (what else is new) as the Gang wandered in. Someone pointed out that Jason and Mike accounted for about 80% of the stories on Valleywag, and Hugh took over the moderator role as I sat in the background and listened. Frankly, I was listening for the sound of a Gillmor-less Gang, something that was frequently run up the flag pole the previous week in the comment areas of Mike's and Jason's sites. If Doc had been on time and not called in via cell at first, we all might have gotten a taste of that product, which I honestly believe would be different but still entertaining. Every time I tried to tweak the flow, it felt superfluous. I wasn't interested in what I had to say, so I laid out some more.

Eventually, I came up with a device to rebalance the session. I asked each of the Gangsters to rate the previous segment from 1-10. Effective as it was in reinserting myself into the mix, it was even more effective in encouraging each player to own their part in the show. Somehow we got through it, with what Dana called a good vibe when we chatted later. The ratings started out high — too high for my taste — and slowly moved lower as the medicine took hold. By the end, Dana and Arrington were both voting with invisible gestures in my direction that were all too easy to see. At least it felt better.

Tonight Tina and I went to the movies — World Trade Center. A good film. One that knew what it was about. Optimistic in its honoring of bravery, that most mysterious of gestures. Made me feel ashamed and strong all at the same time. Nobody comes close to disrespecting me as I can; nobody is surer than me of the value of what we're doing. When it works, the stuff sparkles as it burns. My contract is with you.

First, Seth and I need to lock down on my strategy to turn the conference into a political convention. Not an unconference, not an ETech or a PC Forum, but a new hybrid television show/interactive alliance matrix that informs the community of their fundamental choice: line up with AOS or risk gestribution.

So, sponsorships model needs to be replaced with contributor model. I have talked with John Furrier of Pod Tech about contributing resources and services for the filming and editing of material that extends the conference content. Specifically, I call Ray Ozzie (via his comm director) and ask him to participate. If/when he says he can't do that date, I follow immediately with requesting some time in Redmond to film him about MS plans for optimization/attention etc. If he declines, I go public with the whole frontal assault on his financial analysts meeting.

Next, Jonathan Schwartz, or rather simultaneously. Same drill. Jonathan can you speak? Chances are no because of prior commitments, but Jonathan will do something with me instead. His comeback might be I don't know enough about this attention thing to comment. (That didn't stop him from doing so for the Release 1.0 thing, but Esther wanted it cut out due to lack of authority.) If he plays it that way, then I write him an explanation of it and publish it immediately on GestureLab. He will comply. Also, we ask him for streaming support for the conference as a contribution.

Next, Benioff. Halfway between Ozzie and Schwartz, his commentary is around the question of how services can manage the roach motel data question. Does he support the Recorder? Open pool? Why not, given his innovations in sharing a percentage of revenue with charities, offering free Salesforce accounts for non profits, etc. How does Salesforce stack up with MS optimization strategy? (Floodgates open.)

The fundamental strategy is that we DON'T want these guys to participate directly in the conference, but as leaders in the community who are being asked to be responsive to users in charge. We roll the clip, then ask the question? How are they aligned? Are they contributors or resistors? For every Ozzie we don't get, we document the degree of resistance to meeting the user halfway.

Important: we NEVER accuse anyone of failure to comply. Instead we ask how and when they will comply.

Cracking open the story lines: engaging Hollywood and the record business. Not by embarrassing or attacking the Cartel, but by peeling the layers of the emergent user in control of point to point content. As I told Furrier last night, tech is the new rock n roll. The big budget production is not the target, nor is user generated content. Everybody except the Gang make the mistake of voting at one end or the other of this continuum. In fact, PROFESSIONALLY rendered user-controlled content is the sweet spot. It's not amateur hour, it's applying low-barrier technology and rapid development methodology to the real competition: soap operas. It's about marrying small HD cameras and GarageBand production models with real enterprise business stories that have enormous implications, and having the actual players represented in the course of operations. If we can't get Ozzie to come out of his bunker, we use the existing footage to tell the story he would have said to us, and interleave it with analysis, bravado from competitors, humor, and the coup de grace, the user in charge overlay. Remember we say to Ray: we're not asking your permission. Users can opt in entirely under their own power. We're funding this effort by delivering return on investment (datapoints) to users and incenting them away from silos and towards the pool. All things being equal, which is better: free, or the user getting paid? So much for Google, btw.

I need to come out of the box no later than tomorrow morning with this campaign. In fact, I should start tonight, flush with Apple's announcements. Leopard's iChat enhancements promise a production studio in every Mac by next spring that allows executive information conferencing in real time, rolling in video and Keynotes, with bundled recording of these video streams. This means that the platform for tech as rock n roll ships in 6 months, which means we use the Conference to release the first product of this new era, by getting contributors to pony up the existing resources to do this now and lock up the market when ANY user can do it in the spring.

Once we understand the dimensions of this operation (now), we can go back and look at what the content for the conference is: how does rich media play today in the attention and gesture experience? What is the value to AttentionSoft of commandeering the media experience of the rock n roll soap opera model, moving from podcast through video (10 minute audio and video promo bursts rolls up tech news by marrying analysis with real time metrics.) Endgadget, in the person of two guys, one writing, one shooting stills, achieved 7 million page views in 90 minutes today at Jobs' keynote. Mainstreamers think that means page views are not dead. We understand page views are commoditized. Given twenty guys with the same setup (approx. zero dollars above normal investment of Mac, camera, and brains) the differentiation is in the analysis. User in control but PROFESSIONAL output. It's a gesture cluster fuck, and guess who wins… the guys who feed the commodity streams into the console and control the political analysis based on the commodity news streams.

So who speaks at the conference? Calaconis properly vetted via requirement of contribution commitment. We ask Esther and Tim and hope they decline, then ask them for interviews to represent their perspectives. How the fuck does Tim dare decline that, based on the refusal going public embedded in a list of untouchables who are trying to preserve their gatekeeper roles. Battelle pinged within twenty minutes of returning from vacation.

Costollo, the VCs — how do they play in this world. Just as Sanborn pointed out that the new Dylan book is a Dale Carnegie BUSINESS book, this conference is a stone cold lay it out for users benefit toolkit for leveraging their barrierless content for professional advantage. Memetracker panel? Hell no. The new publisher in the Attention/Gesture economy. Hell yes. Rafat Ali, TechCrunch, Ray Lane, Benioff on a panel. Or clips flown in from those who can't be there, or iSIght interviews followed by live conversation. Attention is the operating system; the conference sessions are the apps. This ain't no stinkin unconference– the audience are chosen for the depth and breadth of their insight, and the output of the conference is what sponsors bid on standing alongside.

This is a blueprint for what we should call the Attention Convention. It is meant to create a skeleton on which we hang all contacts, media requests, contributor requests, etc. In this context, we can allocate time and resources (Ozzie trip because it cracks open the AOL bullshit by comparing MS to AOL, not our grassroots thing) efficiently and rapidly over the next 30 days. Actually we have a week in public time starting now.

As Scott Trotter points out in a comment, my InfoRouter feed has been redirected to this GestureLab feed. I've sent email to Nick Bradbury with Scott's report about FeedDemon. It's updated as well in Rojo, but interestingly it continues to list the old info about the feed:

Steve Gillmor's InfoRouter

Your data, your attention
Link: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gillmor
Link to feed: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gillmor/wp-rss2.php

Last Published: 8/7/06 7:34 PM

18 Unread Stories Number of subscribers: 289

Anyone know how or why this is working, and whether Rojo is broken?

He's the Golden Boy of the Valley, and everyone wants to come to his party (I'm number one on the list.) So what is he doing this dog day of August? Doing tech support for the Washington Post. Hopefully he'll post something about all these mainstreamers calling him up and asking for an explanation about the AOL data breach. As my daughter said when she was 5, let me undersplain this to you Daddy.

Today's Apple thing was deceptively simple. None of the mainstreamers got it; they all wanted to know why there was no Just One More Thing, no phone, no iPod HD. Nope, nothing except the Toolkit for the Death of the Mainstream Media as we once thought we knew it. The Just One More Thing came at the beginning of the OS/X section, where Jobs said they were holding back on some Top Secret stuff. We could only imagine.

Meanwhile these two guys behind me were printing money. I'm sitting there typing up my little notes, while two guys from EndGadget one row back are getting 7 million page views in 90 minutes. Two tin cans and a string: 7 million clicks. Later, my mainstreamer friend asks the media controller if there's a replay (he had no idea) while the EndGadget boys were busy uploading a podcast of the show. And onstage Jobs and his lieutenants were announcing (in one of a list of ten features) the disembowelment of network television.

Hello, Mike? Can you undersplain why this data theft is bad? Cut to EndGadget boys uploading Krugerands. Can you email me the AOL data Mike? 2 gigabytes may not make it through… I wonder whether YouSendIt could handle the file? Cut to Jobs ticking off iChat Studio features. Cut to his sidekick creating a screen full of widgets that disembowels the Portal model. Cut to EndGadget guy handing me his card as music from The Sting swells in the background.

Let me undersplain something to mainstream media. As Beck says: two turntables and a microphone. You want to survive? Bet on yourself and learn what is going to ship next spring on the Mac. Or don't worry about it, and call Mike up and let him undersplain it. That's Mike TechCrunch, new media boy. It's a perfect storm folks, wake up or sleep late. Your choice.

50% new to the Mac

Best quarter ever 1.33 M shipped

3/4 Intel

Mac Pro Xeon chipset Woodcrest

64 bit

3x G5

all 2 Quad Xeon processors

2.1x integer performance

1.6x floating point

Final Cut Pro 1.4x faster

less cooling (perf per watt):

4 hard drives

4 PCI slots

snap in drives

1 standard config

$2499

$1K less than Dell

ships today

Xserve

2.0 2.66 3.0 Ghz

5x faster

redundant power

2.25 terabytes

$2999

5x perf 1K less

Dell 3,293

October

OS/X

3K Universal apps

210 days

Bertrand Serlet Vista compare

registry, dll hell, activation

Leopard

some secrets but…

Scott Forrestal shows 10 features

1. 64 bit support Unix, Carbon, Cocoa - 32 and 64 side by side
2. Time Machine — 26% back up, 4% auto back up. Auto everything auto back up. Restore everything, a la carte. Hard drive or server. Go back in time to last month, grab preso and return to present. Go back in time, fly through time to diff in folder. Dclick, preview, restore, done. Works with Finder, address book, photos, etc. Doesn't say where it stores it.
3. Complete Package — BootCamp, Front Row next gen, PhotoBooth
4. Spaces — wrap collections of apps in a space. Demo — podcast, Garageband, Final Cut Pro, navigate around apps in space, drag and drop screens to work interactively.
5. Spotlight — search other Macs, shared, can search. Search servers. Advanced search — boolean, file type. App launcher. Recent items, prepopulated.
6. Core Animation — increase production value — Time Machine built in it. Decompose scene into layers — text, images, openGL, etc. Start state, goal state, key frames. Automatic animation. Demo: move independently, roteate, 3D. Not a movie, interactive live production.
7. Universal Access — VoiceOver, closed caption in Qtime, Braille. VO demo: first plays Tiger female voice. Beta, deeper, inflection. Shipping in Leopard, even better "spearheading" still weak. Speed up audio faster and still clear.
8. Mail — Stationary, Notes, ToDo's. Stationary: Standard HTML, templates, make your own. Notes: special message type, mailbox. ToDo: select, make it a todo. Any incoming message or doc, make it a todo. ToDo service. Demo: Stationary for photos, baby announcements, get wells, dinners. Add stationary template after writing email. Drag and drop photos in.
9. Dashboard — 2500 widgets available today. Dashcode: design, develop, debug widgets. Precanned templates, RSS, Podcasts, images. Modify and edit. Produces HTML and CSS. Parts library. Javascript editor and debugger. Breakpoints, eval expressions. Web Clip: turn any part of any web page into widget. Demo: extract dilbert cartoon, crop, create widget. Pick theme, every day, will update with that strip. eBay auction — track. Widget live of that part of web page. Top ten list of downloads. Web cams into widget, updates live.
10. iChat — Multiple logins, invisibility, animated buddy icons, video recording, tabbed chats. Add Photobooth effects. iChat Theater. Backdrops. Demo: keynote through iChat video. Play Qtime in window. Backdrops, images and moving video.

iCal going full multiuser.

Xcode 3 announced today

dev preview ships today

Leopard ships Spring 07 

Last night at the WordCamp party I was told by several people that I could switch the blog display from excerpting to full text. I think they were talking about the RSS feed, which is already doing that. I hope they are right in saying there is a way to change the blog presentation, or I may have to close down the site. Thanks in advance for help in the comments. We've changed the template in the meantime.

Just got off the phone with Doc Searls, who was farting out the door in the hallway in Cambridge. Doc asserts that while rarely does a day pass without hearing men farting, women fart only very occasionally and auspiciously, at least audibly. Now back to our movie, "Citizen Kane" starring Jason Calaconis.

I'm having a surprising amount of fun writing this blog given that no one is reading it. It's like the pleasure I get being told by Fred Wilson, who I admire tremendously, that my no link theory is crap. He's basing this on a response to Robert Scoble's account of a conversation he had with me over dinner a few nights ago. Of course Robert didn't link to Fred, so how he entered the conversation is one interesting datapoint, as is his assertion about me, which is embedded in the comments where no link is even possible.

Speaking of comments, I notice one in the penultimate InfoRouter post from Matthew Rothenberg calling me out for a cheap shot I took at a former colleague at eWEEK.com. In turn this comment generated a post by someone (apparently a friend of Matt's) that explicitly names the editor in question while supporting Matt's thesis that I was fired because I stopped producing enough content. Since Matt is the guy that fired me, he should know.

But the irony again is that I am being called out for a cheap shot against another editor (guilty) who I specifically did not name but identified as being in the San Francisco office to make clear it wasn't anyone else such as Matt or Jim Lauderback or Eric Lundquist or any of the other fine people at Ziff Davis. Then through this trail of crocodile tears by Matt some other guy directly identifies the guy who I called out as lecturing me about journalism. (Pausing for breath)

All this, and nowhere does it seem that Matt gets the point that by personifying this he is demonstrating my point (in the original post) that certain folks at the time at Ziff didn't and don't get how pathetic the page view model is, and how poisonous to the creation of content. Simply put, one more time: writing that values people's time will eventually push out older models that operate by attracting, extending, teasing, breaking it up into multiple page views, capturing yesterday's headline with a two-graf supplement to "keep the audience informed" and other tricks of the trade that ultimately converge on meaningless as competitors raise the noise level above the value of each individual "news" piece.

Again, the irony is that not linking, or not naming, or not denigrating personally but rather professionally ends up producing a shitstream of the exact opposite. Vive la Internet. 

It used to be (Thursday) that if you had a great conversation with Scoble and all things were revealed and understood, that if, on the way home, he ran into somebody who captivated him with some detail about Second Life or other, he'd post about that. Last in, first out.

Well, not sure what happened or didn't but Robert not only remembered about gestures, but about not linking too. Wait, that's it–you have to leave him with two things to block further interrupts.

But seriously, when did Scoble grow up? Summer school? Music camp? We know the answer, but we're still impressed.

Here I am at Syndicate.