July 30th, 2006
Arrington returns
As Mike reports on his Crunchnotes blog, he’s agreed to rejoin the Gillmor Gang. I’m very glad for this turn of events, particularly in light of the large amount of exposure the show has gotten via Valleywag.
However, I am dismayed by Nick Douglas;’ tactics in his investigation of Mike’s alleged conflicts of interest, as detailed in a letter Mike was forwarded by someone who Douglas has contacted. The document speaks for itself, I’m afraid, and does a tremendous disservice to Nick Douglas himself. The language of the letter is reminiscent of a McCarthyite witchhunt–there’s unfortunately no other way to read it.
I admire Nick’s writing, and think he’s one of the funniest and talented people in the community. But I also know Mike to be one of the smartest, and rigorously circumspect people in the Valley, and in fact would not count him as either a friend or even a one time guest on the Gillmor Gang, let alone a core member, if he was so stupid, venal, or self-destructive to do the kinds of things Nick is looking to "uncover" with these letters.
Frankly, I am much more concerned for the impact this will have on Nick’s career, who is in my dealings with him to date, strikes me as an honest, fair person. But this crosses a line I hope he’ll reconsider, and I said that to him directly in a phone conversation with him this afternoon. If that brings me the kind of examination he’s foisting on Mike, so be it. I’ve got nothing to hide, and my bet is neither does Mike. Welcome back to the Gang, Mr. Arrington.
July 30th, 2006
As I was saying
When I met with Dan Farber last week to discuss closing InfoRouter down, we agreed I’d use a last post to both wind up the blog and detail my future plans. Although I’d intended to write this and release it tomorrow (Monday) it seems appropriate to work on it tonight and jump the gun a little. Also, I’ve got people breathing down my neck about releasing Parts II and III of Resignation Gang, and I’m stalling hoping I can announce some better bad news about the Gang first.
As you know, this has been a tough week for me and my family, with our beloved dog Murphy gone to the big Squirrel Chase in the sky. I thank you so much for your condolences and expressions of shared understanding of this passage. Lying on the sofa today, our cats slowly came over and curled around me, as the melancholy begins to lift.
Writing this blog has been in many ways the end of a journey for me. My brother was one of the first mainstream journalists to start writing a blog all those years ago, and although I only started a blog for real after I was fired from the back page column of InfoWorld, I always felt a kinship that perhaps sprang from the style of editor’s notes I started writing as editor in chief and editorial director for XML and JavaPro magazines. Indeed, one of the things that led directly to my firing at InfoWorld was my refusal to hew to a new more traditional style mandated by the newly appointed CEO and editorial director. It wasn’t that it was unreasonable; it was that I didn’t want to do it. A blogger’s choice in a mainstream world.
Following Mike Vizard to CRN, I began the same process I’d begun at InfoWorld by hiring Jon Udell, of seeding a blogging infrastructure inside CMP (the parent publishing company) by starting the first blog, named Steve Gillmor’s Emerging Opps by Vizard in an attempt to somehow bridge the chasm between a channel book and a disruptive flamethrower. You notice I’ve linked to the blog here, in apparent conflict with The Death of Links. Well, you can scroll down a bit to where I started that crap in the first place, on September 30, 2003. Ironically or not, the permalink is broken.
Around that time, my friend John Taschek resigned as eWEEK Lab director (the job I held at InfoWorld) and I negotiated a deal between eWEEK print EIC Eric Lundquist and online czar Jim Louderback to write an OpEd column in the print book and run a section of the online site on collaboration and messaging. Of course, once again I offered myself as the guinea pig for eWEEK.com’s first blog. Each successive RSS opp, which is how I saw the process of tunneling under IT to establish blogging, and then RSS, as a strategic (and destabilizing) virus inside the mainstream trade press, moved a little faster than the last. Udell’s success at commandeering the dominant page view metrics (and most of the InfoWorld brand integrity to boot) was by now becoming obvious to even the most entrenched ostriches (names withheld, as with links, because you already know who you are.)
Ironically or not, that first post of Steve Gillmor’s Blogosphere is the only one that survives. The Wayback Machine provides the rest, like this post about the first Gillmor Gang, right up to the day I was fired in July, 2004. Only now, with Mike Vizard running Ziff Davis Online Enterprise, have blogs by such fine writers as Peter Coffee finally surfaced. Ironically or not.
It was at eWEEK.com that I developed my profound loathing for the page view model, which I viewed (correctly of course) as the next big handbag to hell for the trade press who had escaped in the helicopters from the collapse of the print model. As with InfoWorld, I was fired for cause, in this case cause I just didn’t give a damn what some online pinhead in the San Francisco office had to say about what journalism was all about. And when I sat next to Dan Farber some weeks before the eWEEK gig fell apart, I took a chance and spilt my guts while we waited for some press conference to start. When the ax fell, Dan conjured a contributing editor slot out of paper mache and chewing gum, and I started posting what first appeared as online columns and finally (hello IT) morphed into this blog in late October, 2004.
Amazingly, I haven’t been fired this time, mostly because Farber has evolved into a close friend from a start as one of my best editors ever, and also because all this gibberish I’ve been spouting over the years about attention and now gestures turns out to be right on the money. As attention gained a capital A, so too did my star rise to the point where some folks are amazed that my brother Dan is related to me. Of course, I’ve seen Dan take the first step out of the pod bay and live to tell about it, making transitions such as Om Malik’s and even Robert Scoble’s a lot easier to fathom. I call him my younger smarter brother because a) it’s true, and b) I’m afraid of him.
A little more about Farber, because although I promised I wouldn’t post this before he saw it, I’m doing it anyway. He’s turned blogging into a journalist art, reinvented himself as editor, stringer, photographer, budget magician (just look at the talent writing blogs for/with him on a fraction of the budget his CNET counterpart plays with), and whatever else it takes to keep so many balls floating in the air. If anything, I’m leaving because he’s convinced me that anything is doable. It’s one thing to champion user control of your own data, and quite another to conjur just the few breadcrumbs that it takes to let me nurse this spark into the full blown inferno it’s become. Airfare to Gnomedex 5, hotel to OnHollywood, lunch when I couldn’t afford the gas to get home and eat. And that’s just the money. At every turn, even some that challenged his beliefs about his own business, he’s there to stick together and offer the best an editor and friend can, a nod of approval and more importantly, the right tone to tell me when I’m off the rails.
I’ve had a lot of occasion to cry these last weeks; the Valley has become a feeding frenzy as the reboot suddenly becomes obvious to everybody. As I leave InfoRouter behind, I am no longer amazed at the vitriol that pours from those who would ascribe the most venal, pathetic, short-sighted, and twisted motives to the pure joy of writing what I see and hear and feel. Imagine for a moment, those who I am calling out–if you were the victim of those same attacks. Think about what would hurt you most, whether it is being fat, old, stupid, corrupt, pathetic, a loser in the hurtful sense of the word. Then brush that off and tell me what hurt worse–any or all of that lot, or the threat of taking away your freedom to communicate, complain, cry, bore, surprise, apologize, delight, and fail. No matter how insufferable I find the mean-spirited people who populate my little corner of this village, I still defend with every fibre of my being your right to spew that crap. Just remember that it’s people like Dan Farber and Mike Vizard and Dave Winer and you, yes you, who are fighting to keep this network out of from under the Thumb.
So I’ve got my reasons for closing down InfoRouter, and tomorrow (if tomorrow is Tuesday) I’ll be on a plane to New York to work with Seth Goldstein on some of the infrastructure for this new world we’re sailing toward. If all goes well — and I know it will — those of you who want to join me in the next phase will just have to sit back and wait for the switch to occur. There will be similar upheaval with Gillmor Gang, but what will emerge will be worth the struggle. In the end, it’s easy to tell who your friends are: they’re the ones who pay attention. Thanks for listening — and stay tuned.
July 28th, 2006
MuzzleWag
I finally figured out how to shut down Nick Douglas and Valleywag: I refused to say anything more in IM (he posted the last thread this morning) but only on the phone, and off the record. So I told him everything I’m going to do next and what I really think about what’s happened up til now–and he can’t write about it. Aaaahhhh. The sweet smell of success. By the way Valleywag rocks bigtime.
July 26th, 2006
GangCrunch
I’ve accepted Mike Arrington’s resignation from the Gillmor Gang. Mike and I had a good chat last night at AlwaysOn and I think he’ll find the opportunity to improve CrunchTalk TalkCrunch well worth it. I notice in the comments to his Crunchnotes resignation post that Jason Calacanis is bummed about Mike leaving as well. Perhaps, as Paul Montgomery suggests later in the same thread, Jason and Mike should team up on Mike’s show. I’ve enjoyed working with both of them and wish them well.
All this comes at a convenient time, as InfoRouter wraps up over the next several days before going off the air July 31. Accordingly, I’ll release the three parts of this Resignation Gang, (mixing Part I at AO Summit this morning) and reboot GG as well. Thanks in advance for listening.
July 24th, 2006
Wagging the Dog
Just wrapped the special Monday recording of the Gillmor Gang, with Mike Arrington, Dan Farber, Dana Gardner, Mike Vizard, Jason Calaconis, and guest Nick Carr. Doc Searls was onroute or teaching at OSCON and couldn’t make it. I should have Part I on the network by tomorrow morning, and on Sirius starting Wednesday.
Last night our dog Murphy died. I can hear him in the silence.
As we drove away from the emergency clinic, Tina wondered if we ever could catch a break. Today I’m thinking we caught a thirteen year one with our puppy.
July 23rd, 2006
Reaching the world
At breakfast yesterday, Mike Arrington made it clear that if I didn’t show up at his party, he would take it personally. I made it clear I would but first I wanted him to kick somebody important down or off the list (or everyone down the list) and insert me in his wiki, which I cannot be accused of ever accessing. As of 3:30 Sunday, no action has been taken.
The last wiki I logged into was the FOO Camp one several years ago when I was still welcome, and I’ve not had that problem since. I would note however that I requested credentials for Web 2.0 quite some time ago and have heard nothing since. Two years ago John Battelle graciously put me on his personal comp list when O’Reilly said the ZDNet quotient was filled up. Last year I was a speaker along with Seth Goldstein at the rollout of the AttentionTrust’s Attention Recorder. This year, silence.
Update: Heard from Battelle, invites haven’t gone out and I’m on the list, that "there are no monsters under the bed…." Well, alright.
With InfoRouter shuttered as of the end of the month, the rationale for identifying me as a legitimate member of the mainstream media might diminish, though I will continue as a ZDNet contributing editor. But that’s not what this is about. This is about connections, as Bob Dylan writes in Chronicles Volume One:
It went to the very root of things, gave unfair advantage to some and left others squeezed out. How could somebody ever reach the world this way? It seemed like it was the law of life, but even if it was, I wasn’t going to sulk about it or, like my grandma said, take it personal.
Speaking of conferences I’m appreciated at, Tony Perkins’ AlwaysOn Summit begins Tuesday night. The feeling is mutual: Tony’s Republican act cleverly submerges his razor-sharp instincts for the real story in the Valley. I couldn’t help cracking up over an AlwaysOn ad on the home page hyping thought leaders and such with Tony, my younger smarter brother and I bracketing Marten Mykos of laMp fame. Our father (who was liberally defined at the extreme left end of the Democrat Party as Tony might put it, would be or is rolling over in his grave. But our grandfather, Rear Admiral in the Navy and friend of Ike and other righties, would be suitably proud of us.
Regardless of which party you belong or are invited to, there really is serious business going on here beyond popularity contests and political maneuverings. During the Gillmor Gang recorded live at Gnomedex this year, Dave Winer brought up the possibility of Senator Edwards supporting BitTorrent with the candidate’s aide Ryan Montoya. As Ryan allowed how it was possible the campiagn would support the peer-to-peer technology, I got a laugh by asking how the fundraising was going with the Cartel. Several days ago, the Edwards Campaign announced BitTorrent support. Laugh line to campaign promise in less than 30 days.
For Dylan, "I knew I was doing things right, was on the right road, was getting all the knowledge immediately and firsthand." But now came a startling thought, "that maybe I’d have to write my own folk songs, ones that Mike didn’t know." That was Mike Seeger, of whom Dylan wrote: "It’s not as if he just played everything well, he played these songs as good as it was possible to play them."
I pondered it. I wasn’t ready to act on any of it but knew somehow, though, that if I wanted to stay playing music, that I would have to claim a larger share of myself. I would have to overlook a lot of things–a lot of things that might even need attention–but that was all right. They were things that I probably felt totally powerless over, anyway. I had the map, could even draw it freehand if I had to. Now I knew I’d have to throw it away. Not today, not tonight, sometime soon, though.
July 23rd, 2006
Cold Turkey
I had breakfast with Mike Arrington. He wanted to know why I called him Magic Mike Arrington. I said because everyone knows that everything he touches turns to magic. Funny how that sounds like a dig when it isn’t. Anyway Mike has this fabulous dog who’s 4 years old and our dog is 14 and dying. You can always tell about people by what their dogs say about them. Mike’s dog is just crazy about Mike.
As we nurse our puppy (we call him that all the time) I’ve been going through some great records. Hendrix continues to amaze, particularly the Starbucks record he just put out. It’s a bluesy selection and fills the bill. And Love and Theft, Dylan’s death suite. And Little Feat, a terrific box set I bought several years ago and never even listened to until now. And then we noticed Murphy was actually getting up and moving from room to room as the music moved with us. Surely it means nothing, but it’s everything to us right now.
I kicked Paxil about a week ago. I’ve been taking it for years since I had a series of atrial fibrillations in 2001 around the time I was negotiating to join InfoWorld. The first one landed me in the hospital in Charleston (I drove myself in) and I thought I was getting away with attending an XML Mag all-hands-on-deck from the hospital bed. I wan’t fooling anyone. Except myself, of course — I’d ignored out-of-control high blood pressure for years. The afibs continued for awhile as the doctors monkeyed with the medication; the last one occurred after a night of beer drinking in an Irish bar on Geary. But while they were happening, they were terrifiying, not the least because they would happen in the dead of night. Hense the Paxil, which curbed my anxiety and allowed me to learn how to realize that the base level of anxiety in my life was as much chemical as based on reality, or at least my dark interpretation of it.
I tried kicking it about six months ago, by cutting the dose in half. After about 2 weeks of it, my wife begged me to reconsider. Of course I should have known — I’ve never been able to stop doing anything to myself by tailing off. So this time I just stopped, and carved out enough time to sleep through any rough spots. My theory was that I’d replace the opiates or whatever that stuff does with sleep. In fact, I’d been doing this sleep dance for a while, shutting down the systems and floating on the edge of dreams — with great results: ideas, conversations with old friends and enemies long since dead or never been born, ’til then.
And this time almost from the beginning I could feel the subtle fog lift. Don’t misunderstand me: the medication saved my life, I really believe. But now i need whatever talent and courage I can muster. We’re in the midst of a transformative moment or wave or whatever we want to call it, and I am unwilling to coast or miss a precious moment of it. Things were going well on the professional front, our kids were in South Carolina for the summer with their grandparents, and Tina and I were finally making some headway in finally unpacking and fixing up the house we moved into 2 years or so ago.
In case you’re wondering, this is more personal than I intended or expected. We got Murphy 13 years ago after Tina and I suffered a miscarriage. We went down to the Charleston ASPCA in our heartbreak and peered into the cages at all these bouncy, jumpy puppies. But Tina’s mother put an end to that notion as she came out of the cages with the most pathetic excuse for an animal in her arms. So mangy that even after a fullbore shave down to the skin they still called him "Scruffy" on his cage door. She put the dog down on the ground near Tina sitting cross-legged, and the creature crawled on its belly trembling with fear right up into her lap. What’s the old line — you don’t choose your family. He sure did. And 10 months later our daughter Naomi was born.
Time to wrap this up, as Day at the Dog Races begins its wending way to a parallel galaxy where dogs outlive their masters. We go into it knowing the rules, the arc, the beginning, the glorious middle, the end. Yes, he’s Murphy as in law. No matter what, things will always screw up. Maybe he’ll screw up and not die on us. Who the hell knows.
July 21st, 2006
Gillmor Daily moving…
from 8:30 PM Eastern 5:30 PM Pacific to
9:30 PM Eastern 6:30 PM Pacific
starting July 31
Sirius satellite 102
July 20th, 2006
Control Alt Delete
I’m shutting down InfoRouter. More when arrangements are finalized.
July 19th, 2006
Jason pays attention
Haven’t got time to get into the debate here, but Magic Mike Arrington is wrong to think Calacanis’ move smacks of desperation. In fact, Jason is the first to pay for gestures, and he won’t be the last. The inversion of the network is validated, and Nick Carr is the New Net’s Paul Revere. As Pete Townshend said the other day, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss–and that boss is YOU [the user in charge].
July 16th, 2006
Illegible Smile
I’m about to release the first half of the Bloggercon Gang, recorded at CNET during lunch of the first day, with Doc Searls, Dan Farber, and Jason Calaconis. Jason is a trip and a half, talking as he was then focused on the rollout of the new Netscape and the rest of the media wars. I knew this was a good show at the time, but reading Geoff Emerick’s account of his days recording the key Beatle tracks from Revolver on encouraged me to let it age a little.
It was a good choice, and with just the faintest hindsight attached, the session sits nicely in the pocket almost from the first second. I’ve tried not to screenscrape the Gang in this context, much in the same way that the Beatles opened the Sgt. Pepper sessions by recording and releasing Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane as the single and only then beginning work on the LP. At the time they didn’t think of the single as such, but the demands of the record company and the deepening of the group’s embed in the studio after years on the road dictated the context of the material and even to some extent its final form.
For me, Bloggercon three weeks or so ago was an intense time of preparation, execution, and experimentation. Preparation for my keynote at Gnomedex, for that is what I saw it as: an opportunity to perform in a safe haven designed by Chris and Ponzi a corner-turn in the Attention fake paradigm shift, as one of my critics put it recently. I hadn’t wanted to lead a discussion at Gnomedex for several reasons, the most important of which being that I didn’t have anything particularly compelling to say. Actually, that’s not quite accurate–I had plenty to say but didn’t feel it was up to me to go public with some of it.
You can hear some of that dynamic in Jason’s talk about AOL’s Netscape strategy and the internal deliberations he felt comfortable talking about in response to a Doc Searls question about the logic–or lack of it–behind AOL’s walled garden approach to the AIM client. It’s not that he is afraid of talking about it; it’s that you can hear him measuring the projected impact of talking about it. Similarly, I have no problem talking about my strategic observations about Attention and Gestures for my own purposes, but have to weigh the impact on my collaborators. One of the fascinating things about Emerick’s view into the Beatles ecosystem is his initial and long-term analysis of George Harrison’s skill as a lead guitarist, and the odd resonance between what the typical perception of Lennon/McCartney was and what, at least for the engineer, was the much more nuanced and fluid reality.
What ultimately comes through is that the Beatles existed because they wanted it to exist, and even when they ended they ended it with a bang not a whimper. They loved each other. Couldn’t get much worse, as Lennon sang. But in doing so, he validated that it was Getting Better all the time. So at the end of several days of meetings and a month or two of posturing and positioning, I sat down with Seth Goldstein and said, let’s stop proving this to each other over and over again, let’s pool our resources (pun intentional) and nail it. Suddenly we had our single, the Attention Operating System, and I had something to talk about.
I don’t pretend to have a thick skin about criticism, odd wouldn’t you say for someone who (apparently) lives on the edge of acceptability in terms of irascibility or just plain rudeness, and a fundamental lack of generosity as the same critic contends in misunderstanding why links are dead. I could pretend that I can’t help myself, but you don’t buy that, now do you… Truth be told, I have a problem with anger, with a passive/aggressive streak that has worked all too well for me at the cost of forbearance and some credibility. Some days I do better than others. Three weeks ago I did well by mostly eating a sandwich for the first half hour of the Gang.
But now, three weeks later, I’m enjoying the execution part of the process: working on this blog and its effectiveness. The last three posts are fundamentally intended to help prepare the ground for this media reboot we’re now in active participation in. When Dave Winer says he has a good idea why I said what I said about him in two of these columns, he’s right. And I stand by them too. Proudly. As he should be proud of Bloggercon. Listen to what Doc says about the experience of being a human attention recorder for those two intense days. Marvel at people like Dan Farber, who gave Bloggercon the home to thrive in; Chris Pirillo and Jake Luddington and their partners, who gave Bloggercon the live webcast feed that expanded that room to a much larger, intensely influential, and powerful audience; the BlogHer women; even Mike Arrington with his easier-than-it-looks willingness to be made fun of in order to strengthen his brand. Mike doesn’t show up on the show that week, too busy sleeping or whatever, but his presence is felt nonetheless.
Now, three weeks later, I’m reading the first volume of Dylan’s Chronicles. What a [censored] revelation. And there at the start of Chapter 2, he describes a woman with an illegible smile. Rock on, Bob. Is it, just maybe, his Mona Lisa…
July 14th, 2006
Vaudeville
This media showdown is getting really interesting. In no particular order, some comments about some of the players:
- Mike Arrington — Why on Earth is he keeping Marshall Kirkpatrick in such a visible position. Nothing against the guy, he’s a good writer and a competent reviewer, but he doesn’t have a clue about what makes Arrington so viral. Neither does Mike–who thinks he’s writing about consumer-facing apps–but his instincts about the enterprise implications of his take are unerring, and extremely valuable in this media showdown. Meanwhile I keep hitting the spacebar with Marshall whenever Mike leaves town. Gotta stop the bleeding. Marshall should go write for Pete Cashmore, where he’s a better fit.
- Om Malik — Recovering from a tailspin caused by investment-itis, where His Omness was too busy thinking about tech stuff to pay attention to what brung him to the party he’s launching. In the last 24 hours he’s hopped on his favorite Skype Is Dead meme, so I’m back from space-barring him and his What do you think page view cash register pitch. Om is the king of what was will still be, and he knows his VoIP stuff cold. Plus he’s a great guy and you can’t fake that. And speaking of tech conservatives…
- Nick Carr — Nick’s problem is that his next book on Utility Computing is too good to put down, and it’s not even written yet. Jonathan Schwartz and Amazon S3 and Google’s entire Gmail attention strategy are writing it in real time, and everytime Nick talks about it on his blog it blows his snarkfest right out of the water. His blogbaiting and Wikipedia suckumentary are oh so not mattering, and everytime he writes about something he knows about (virtualization) he drives the stake in all the more. Face it Nick, you’re too smart for your own shtick. He, Stephen O’Grady, and Dan Farber own the enterprise analysis space, except when they can’t see around the blind spot between the rear and right view mirrors. You know, the one where Ray Ozzie doesn’t really get RSS yet. And speaking of RSS…
- Dave Winer
- Tim O’Reilly — Finding his sea legs in the Blogosphere, he’s clearly had a meeting with his editors to figure out a successful posture, sending Nat Torkington out to contribute detailed analyses of Valley startups, and personally carrying Microsoft’s Live water with a long, persuasive why-the rich-get-richer Web x0 back-end lockdown monopoly. The length, depth, and quality of the pieces begs the question: What is O’Reilly Media’s business? Certainly not page views, or keeping strategic information behind the firewall, or How Open Source will Compete or Win. And speaking of Web 2.0…
- John Battelle — Pointed prominently at previously described pieces. Restructured his blog and then in recent days appeared to return to the old strategy of being John Battelle, with good results. There’s still time for his conference to jell, but harking back to his Database of Intentions insight will not sufficiently capture enough of the Attention momentum to balance Tim’s tip toward Microsoft and Sun and away from the grassroots. Supernova had a hard time competing with free unconferences, and so will Web 2.0, unless John opens the door to Winer in a meaningful way–and that ain’t gonna happen.
And if all this weren’t enough to set the heart afibrillatin’, all of these guys are standing in a circle facing each other at the OK Corral. Om and Mike are carving up the page view widget real estate on their blogs, competing against their deal with Battelle’s FMPub. With the All Star game history, trading barriers are dropping, so we’ll soon see various relief pitchers moving from one site to another. The old guard trades are tipping too–ZDNet’s David Berlind is doing a MashupCamp events startup with Doug Gold, late of IDG. Amanda, Scoble, Staci, MacManus, every single Gangster and guest–the whole world is watching as vaudeville makes its move for the Big Screen.
July 10th, 2006
New Morning
I was gratified to hear from Sun PR that the problem with Sun events invites has been fixed. Apparently I’ll now be invited regardless of whether it corresponds to my beat area, which is a good thing because a) I have no beat area and b) I’m not really a journalist. One of several emails asked whether I wanted a pre-briefing under embargo; no, I didn’t because I am not a reporter and have no need to write on deadline for a news break the next morning. Valleywag calls me a ZDNet columnist, which is fair since before this blog started I contributed a few blog posts as columns, and I’ve been a columnist for eWEEK and InfoWorld before that.
But today I’m glad to say that with Dan Farber’s relentless rearchitecting of ZDNet as a blog farm, David (MindCamp) Berlind’s transformation from columnist to bloggernist, and blogumnists Arrington, Malik, Carr, Calacanis, MacLeod, Winer, and the Doc et al stuffing my inforouter with goodies each day, we are in a Golden Age. All of us, except for the PR folks. They haven’t quite gotten up to speed, and honestly, I just ran out of patience this weekend.
I’m not saying these folks are clueless–far from it. Microsoft punished me for some time for transgressions around Allchin, Raikes, Sinofsky, and most recently, the Pinhead spokesman for Office Dead who Dan Farber talked to and I railed against even longer than the commercial "breaks" on the Gillmor Gang. I was invited to Ray and Bill’s Live rollout after one particularly aggressive bitchfest on my part, but nothing about Mix06, TechWeb, VSLive, or any of the other Microsoft events that Arrington regularly skips. As Sun’s VP for Global Communications correctly understood, it’s not that I want to go to most of these events, just have the opportunity to ignore them. Different…. Negative gestures are very valuable in clearing mental and other real estate for more strategic thinking and acting.
Since my prescient call on Bill’s latest Excellent Adventure, I’ve been hearing more from the right people up north. But I issued a direct invitation to CSA Ozzie to attend my talk on the Attention Operating System at Gnomedex and heard nary a word. I trust he was back home on the East Coast for the holiday 4th, but still there is no clear methodology for indicating whether or not he’s interested in having a dialogue on this next phase of the post-RSS revolution. So I throw this post out as a nudge to Wagged and internal MS PR to remind them that I am asking a direct question and hope that, unlike the historical pattern during the Gates era, I will be given the chance to have the conversation at a time when it can be arranged. Given Sun PR’s reaction, I’m optimistic.
July 9th, 2006
All Along the Watchtower
Where to begin…
First, I’m chatting with Dan Farber about what’s going on this coming week. He mentions Mashup Camp on Wednesday and Thursday, which I’m registered for, and a Sun announcement on Tuesday, which I’m not. Sun continues to befuddle me: its CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, lists this blog on his blogroll, yet his PR guy, Noel Hartzel, persists in not fixing the problem of making sure I’m kept up to speed with Sun announcements. I wish they’d make up their mind: either fix the stupid PR problem, or drop me from the blogroll. Everytime I see Jonathan, I try and embarass Noel by complaining, but as Dan Farber says, he probably could care less. Maybe this will solve the problem. I doubt it.
Then Dave Winer, who I consider a friend, raises questions about Podshow’s roll-out of its new website. We all know about Dave’s feelings about Podshow and its principals, and I’ve been given a reasonably wide berth in spite of Dave’s antipathy, considering the fact that I have a production deal with Podshow for The Gillmor Gang, Gillmor Daily, and Attention Tech podcasts. This goes both ways, I might add, since I’ve had Dave on the Gang and on the debut show of Gillmor Daily, among many other times. Indeed, Dave manned one of the two participant mikes with Scoble at the Gangcast at Gnomedex a few weeks ago.
I figured that the problems he outlined with the Podshow site rollout were most likely attributable to a mistake in coding or haste in deployment. As a subscriber to Adam Curry’s feed, I subsequently saw something either there or somewhere else that indicated that surmise was correct, and went back to waiting for the fix to come. As a subscriber to Dave’s Wordpress comment feed, I watched a succession of comments attribute the situation largely to characterizations of theft and other nefarious misdeeds. Still, I figured it was par for the course. Surely Dave has every right to lend his voice to concerns about copyright and other blogosphere issues of openness, transparency, and other concerns. Indeed, my support for Dave’s concerns at Blake Ross’s Gnomedex talk put me squarely in the line of fire from Blake and others both in the room and subsequently online. Luckily, the session was podcast, and I stand by my comments.
But I’m not supportive of Dave’s continued attack on Podshow’s motives. In a series of comments on a Gnomedex discussion list that I evidently am subscribed to as a result of attending either this year’s, last year’s, or the previous year’s conference, Dave has called for an apology from Adam, decried the podcast Adam linked to by way of response as not an apology, and insisted Adam remove his (Dave’s) MP3’s from the site. Finally, Dave reiterates the use of the word "abortion" as a fair characterization of Podshow’s actions.
Certainly I trust the request to remove Dave’s ‘casts will be (maybe has been?) honored, but I consider the rest of this inflammatory and not worthy of Dave’s justified position as the prime progenitor of RSS and its offspring the podosphere and the blogosphere. I particularly would note that Dave’s enclosure format allows inclusion of a URL regardless of its server location, a feature that Dave has used numerous times to point at and therefore "include" in his enclosure feed podcasts from other sources, mine included, going back to the earliest days of podcasting leading up to the 2004 primary campaign. This, in my view, is a feature, not a bug, as it allows us (the users in charge) to create micro-community networks based on our interests and perspectives. If this is wrong, so are links, by the way. I think not. Dead, but not wrong.
Dave has also weighed in on the Rocketboom controversy, and I think he’s wise to suggest we listen to both sides of the story. I think the play this story has gotten, as with Scoble’s move, demonstrates the deeply personal concern we all have for how we transition into viable careers in this new framework. I remember a night in the late 70’s when I walked into the Joyous Lake in Woodstock, a bar-cum-nightclub where local musicians jammed. As I pushed my way in past some bikers on their way out, I made some snarky comment under my breath to a friend. One of the bikers pulled up short, whirled on his boots, said to me quietly "You’re not fu@king invisible, asshole," and moved on. It was good advice then, and now.
I’ve been reading books for the first time in years, two in particular–a Jimi Hendrix biography heavy on the music, less so on the drugs and sex, and Geoff Emerick’s book on engineering the later Beatle records. Both books detail the transition from live performing to recording studio, and the subsequent struggle with collaboration, serendipity, controlled chaos, and friendship. As we go through a strikingly similar period today, history seems to be repeating itself, or at the very least resonating with our "new" network. As I read the books, I wonder: who is the new George Martin, the Chas Chandler, the Buddy Miles, the Miles Davis, the young or older George Harrison, any of the Bob Dylans, the Jason Calacanis, the Mike Arrington, the Dave Winer, the Nick Douglas, you get the point.
The interesting thing about the Emerick book is that he gives a nuanced portrait of the Fab Four, the slowly dawning realization of Lennon & McCartney that Harrison has grown into the role, or as Lennon put it, "He suddenly became aware of who he was." And at the same time, the myopia of each of our individual perspectives, the way our path skews the resulting slice of the timeline to our innate manias/desires/delusions. Emerick was there for most but not all of the Big Bang–he quit during the White Album, sat out the Let It Be "abortion" and missed the earliest parts of Abbey Road when the group slowly reformed.
The true architect of Abbey Road turns out to be Billy Preston, whom Harrison brought into the Let It Be sessions to embarass the group into behaving themselves. It worked on Get Back, and precipitated the last rooftop concert. Once they got clear of the conceit of the back to basics project, they inevitably drifted into the Abbey Road sessions, albeit with some careful baffling around the rough edges of the dynamics, like Yoko in a bed in the corner of the studio for the first month.
So here’s good luck to Andrew and Amanda Rocketboom, and Dave and Adam Podosphere, and Miki Arrington and ValleySmack and The Mighty Om and all the good boys and girls that make up this big family we find ourselves born into. If we’re going to take everything personally–I know I will–let’s try and have some fun doing it.
July 4th, 2006
Adam’s Mom
Adam Curry’s mom passed away over the weekend. All of our thoughts and love are with you and your family, Adam.
June 30th, 2006
The Attention Operating System
Transitions:
Procedural
Declarative/attributes
Connectedness
Bag of drivers
Abstracted layer above
RSS — lightweight instantiation of Web Services
Attention the meta layer above information routing
Net threading of bit processing
Gestures signalling layer of info net
Same way that WTS pushes only change bits and XAML drives API for UI gestures, mine what is not done or stopped as high value return
Contract initiated by users, not publishers
Gestributors as metapublisher rolls up content as a gesture among many
In it to win it: Gestribution uber OS
Contribute and authenticate to Gestribution network.
Affinity formation creates application base
Open pool creates attention currency
Gesture streams create invitations for contract
Pool validates GestureRank
AOS authenticates via pool contract
Apps validate via affinity contracts
Licensing reflects valuation of contract and GestureRank of participants
Data portability guarantees choice and pricing pressure
Pool data can be combined with gestural data to favor user control
Establish microcommunities with provable buying power
Analogy to OS cycle allocation validated by microcommunity metadata: interrupts and resource allocation prioritized at GestureRank layer based on contract evaluation
Content flows or doesn’t flow based on gesture/contract dynamic aka gesturecred
*****************************
The Attention Operating System
Requirements:
Attention principles ( at.org)
Attention kernel (atx)
Attention framework (attentionsoft)
Attention applications
Root.net
– behavioral recording
– social expression (gb certified)
– influence metering
GestureBank
–Open anonymized pool
–WYSIWYContribute
June 25th, 2006
A Hamburger Today
Now that BloggerCon is over, I’m going to start releasing some of the backlog of Attention Deficit Theatre and Gillmor Gangs that have built up. Those who, like me, stayed in bed this morning and listened to the ConCast were treated to a remarkable string of interesting stuff, none of which would I want to compete with for your attention but rather support by suggesting you listen to the podcast versions available on the BloggerCon site. Mike Arrington’s Core Values was great to see in person, and Dan Farber’s classic photographs elsewhere on this site convey much of the additional metadata.
I’m also starting tomorrow, between compiles and mixdowns, to put together materials for my Gnomedex session on Friday afternoon. Normally I would wait until the last moment and then wing it, but I hope to have several important things to announce and convey, and at a minimum want to create an outline from which to work. The problem with an outline, however, is that it means booting up Word. Or PowerPoint. I could cheat and use Keynote, but Doc, who’s a master of this presentation thing, would again reiterate that PowerPoint rules. But the real reason I don’t want to use either is that I always get the nagging impression from a PowerPoint that I’m getting pitched. The experts at this: R0ml, Doc, Dick Hardt, are so obviously credible that they survive that subtle problem handily. But I am not in their league, and would rather come up with a different plan than start off a lap back.
Arrington’s BloggerCon session was similarly placed to where mine will be on Friday, coming at the end of a long day but before the host’s last word. His was essentially a therapy session, with him as the therapee and the room as therapist. His problem: Life at the top sucks. As I jokingly said to him before the session, I had to get out of bed and come down for this, because to my knowledge this was the first time I’d heard of a trainwreck preannounced for 4:30. And it outperformed the hype, with Mike posing questions and then relentlessly interrupting the answers with corrections or more questions. He doesn’t call it TalkCrunch for nothing.
My problem is different: I’m not Mike Arrington. I can’t get away with being totally wrong just through the force of my personality. Besides, I’m not wrong. I wasn’t wrong when I said Notes was dead (August, 2002) or Office (November, 2005) or links (sorry, look it up). Now, just because Mike isn’t really totally wrong all the time doesn’t mean I am wrong any of the time. Lucky for me that Doc hasn’t put together a slide deck about my link prognosis. Even without it, according to Arrington, nobody thinks I’m right about that. Nobody.
This is where Jason Calacanis comes in. Now here’s a guy who, just because he got $25 million for Weblogs, Inc., doesn’t necessarily know what he’s talking about any more than he did before that. But I’m sitting at a table at some event and suddenly he’s there literally begging to be on the Gillmor Gang. And the next thing I know he’s telling us that when everybody says you don’t know what you’re talking about, that’s where the big opportunity is.
OK, so about links: here’s an idea I had a few days ago lying around chasing dreams. So links are dead. It’s 2 years later, I’m in the inforouter and I see a citation, say, "links are dead." No link. I hover over the words, right in the middle over "are". The service (2 years later, software is dead, only services) grabs my recent gestures, factors in my affinity stream, and gives me what is essentially a gesture-check squiggly line, a dynamic link. Now quick, hurry up and go trademark this idea, because remember that this is two years from now and I just gave you the idea for nothing. Think about it. How hard would it be to implement this? Not hard.
Think of it: no more clicking on links to posts you’ve already read. No more missing posts that live ten minutes down the list past the time you have to read before you go to the meeting. You get the idea. But only if you act now. Two years from now–too late. Office 2007? Naah. Office Live 2007? Maybe. Tethered to a gated attention pool? That’s the billion dollar question. One that Ray Ozzie and Sergey Brin and Steve Jobs will have to answer in the next few months. Not years.
Hopefully I’ve given you something to think about in the days leading up to Friday. Many Most will ignore this. Nick Carr may call it naive. Valleywag won’t care. Dave Winer won’t point. Mike Arrington will get richer. And each day we’ll be one day closer. See you in Seattle.
June 24th, 2006
GapingWidget
A few months ago Hugh Macleod of GapingVoid fame joined the Gillmor Gang. Mike Arrington suggested Hugh produce a widget, and now he’s gone and done it, as Mike reports on TechCrunch today. I’ve linked to Mike directly here so as to annoy him, as thanks for ignoring my request not to link to my fabulous And the Wind Cries Larry post the other night. By the way, any of Mike’s moronic trolls who would like to come bother me, feel free. You guys suck. Hugh, on the other hand, rocks.
June 23rd, 2006
Tools
Sitting in the back row at BloggerCon. Phil Torrone makes me feel old (in a good way) with his bouncy enthusiasm and MMOG vibe. Sylvia Paul wants auto transcripts. Buzz shuts down the podcasting discussion. It filters back up. Microsoft guy complains about use of the word podcast. Dave wants to stay away from RSS or OPML so things dart in and out of priestspeak.
June 23rd, 2006
And the Wind Cries Larry
The last few days have seen a real ramp up of attention/gesture stuff. The combination of Bloggercon and Supernova this week and Gnomedex next week have brought many of the constituents of the so-called Attention Economy into view. One of the incipient players–Jellyfish–are embargoing their story until Monday to take advantage of a Wall Street Journal exclusive, but scuttlebut by some attention geeks seems to indicate they are intermediaries between users and some sort of attention marketplace.
I sat in on an AttentionTrust board meeting along with Christine Herron of Omidyar as friends of the non-profit I co-founded with Seth Goldstein. It was exciting to see what the Omidyar support and Executive Director Ed Batista’s full court press are doing to consolidate the Trust’s gains. GestureBank architect Robert Anderson shipped the IE 6/7 alpha recorder to testers this afternoon. Seth and Father of Attention Michael Goldhaber shared coffee with Jonah Goldstein and me near City Hall. Public Radio’s Stephen Hill sent me Goldhaber’s most recent First Monday speech on Openness and Attention, which I inhaled in between chapters of this amazing Jimi Hendrix history.
I snuck into Supernova to see the panel with Craig Newmark and Seth’s wife and AOL power broker Tina Sharkey. Then I repaired to the lobby couches and watched Seth and Jonas giggle like grade-schoolers as their Root worm widgets began to tunnel their way into the Root architecture. Jonas and I debated the analogy between Hendrix feedback and the Widget/worm platform. Craig came over and sipped from the Palace Hotel wifi, pronouncing it better than the Supernova feed. Then Craig ran through his comedy stylings for me over ice lattes (or some version of coffee and icecream or white goo for Craig) at the Starbucks down the street.In a Pirandellian moment, I read Craig’s Chronicle and flipped past a Valleywag (mispelled with the capital W embedded) story on Craig recycled by the ChronBlog with what Craig called a humor value add.
Speaking of Valleywag, I think I’ve discovered how to game the Nickster–say nice things about him. He’s looking for the thin skin rebound and doesn’t know quite what to do with the warm fuzzies. Seriously, he’s one funny dude. He’s getting a run for his money from Nick Carr, however. Good luck on attacking David Berlind over the Jon Udell Affair. Seriously, links are dead.
Speaking of Steve Ballmer, Dave Winer has it wrong. Ballmer is critical to Microsoft’s survival. There, I’ve now instituted my new campaign to never get onto Scripting News again. Remember: links are dead. Now, citations are also dead. I explained my theory to Michael Goldhaber and he promptly wrote it down in his notebook. So I figure now it’s time to see if never appearing on Scripting News will do anything to slow down the Attention Snowball. I bet not.
Doc Searls and I recorded Attention Deficit Theatre II about 2 weeks ago. I made a special copy of it for Dave to listen to on the way back from NY but he didn’t. When he did, he quoted one line from it, the Johnny Carson joke. I figured that meant he didn’t like it. I was right. Doc and I are seriously off the rails on this one, so much so that I am afraid to release it for fear that it might be classified as a munition by Rumsfeld. All I can say is that Scoble is in for a treat.
We’re going to try and record this week’s Gillmor Gang tomorrow during Bloggercon lunch. Together with the Hugh Macleod Attention Deficit Gang, the famous never-to-see-daylight Dyson Meltdown Gang, and last week’s I Told You So Gang gloatfest, I think it’s time to leave some masters in a cab like Hendrix did with Axis Bold As Love.
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