Attention
With the help of a non-responsive Jason Calacanis, who later unwittingly responded through the very podospheric phenomenon which he outlined in a recent Gillmor Gang, and the hyperbolic responsiveness of Steve Gillmor, by means of linguistic attrition, the epitome of negative metadatic gesture, I’ve concluded what has been a troubling week of uncertainty with a newfound clarity.
I am talking, specifically, about implicit meme propagation and affinity proliferation.
Let’s break that down:
A link to another blogger can be explicit or implicit. A vote on Netscape.com is explicit. In the case of audio, you can explicitly talk about a subject in a positive or negative way, but even if you say, “I don’t like Splenda.” you are implicitly propagating a meme. A comment on a blog post or a link to one implicitly infers value at the other end, even if the value is to point or comment on something you don’t like.
Implicit gestures are what propagate memes, moreso than explicit actions.
By comparison of the sum total of our implicit gestures ( a gesture is usually implicit by nature, so I don’t need to specify that), we can see affinity groups form on the long tail portion of the gesture graph.
By using social networking applications to bring these affinity groups together, or direct like information to these groups through behavioral targeting, we can create fluid and virtuous circles of trust and value transfer.
That is the new economy.
And I tend to conclude that sites like digg are fun, but only a stepping stone toward the attention filters and value exchange systems of the very near future, because the implicit is what has and will rule, because it can be trusted and can’t really be faked.
The explicit will always be subject to gaming.
Something has been bothering me since Adam Curry talked about media vs. technology on the Gillmor Gang.
And I’m also left wondering why Jason Calacanis pumps up AdSense and yet gets labeled a “media guy”, or even calls himself such.
I think it’s a dis-credit to himself. He’s much more than that.
He’s an “Attention” guy.
You see, media by it’s very nature can be disintermediated, and I don’t think any strategy that could fall prey to that is a good one.
Is Google a media company?
No.
Media companies aggregate content makers and act as mediaries between the advertisers and the media consumers. (sorry to Doc, i don’t like the word consumer either)
Google is doing more than that.
They are an Attention clearing house.
It’s what Jason might call an enabler, and it’s why the successful new companies we adore all seem to be doing just that. (del.icio.us, grazr, edgio, top ten sources etc.)
They are enabling an attention transaction to occur. Think eBay or Craigslist. OPML, not HTML. Tom Morris, not Morris, the Cat.
There is no enabling happening here, just intermediation.
Jason’s latest venture is about enablement, so I think he’s on the right track. Paying people doesn’t change that, as long as a service is open.
Attention enablers can’t be disintermediated. They can be replaced, but not disintermediated.
I don’t come from the software industry. I much more relate to what Dave Winer calls a himself, a “media hacker”. And that’s what he calls Scoble too.
It’s not really about technology. That is a means, not an end.
Technology itself can be disintermediated or commodified. Soon, we will plug into technology like we do into electrical outlets. It’s happening now.
So I say that the winning companies are not media companies or technology companies, but Attention companies.
And if PodShow is a media company, it may succeed in the short run. But to last and grow, it will have to transform to an Attention company. So will Tribune, New York Times, Microsoft, Podosphere.com and the whole lot.
I’m hoping part two of the latest Gillmor Gang will prove more interesting.
If you remember the Jason and the Argonauts tale, you might know how Jason succeeded in conquest over the Seed men by casting a stone at one, who thought it was his neighbor, and letting them all kill each other.
That’s what Steve Gillmor seems to do by letting the fellas discuss the importance of Google algorithms and whether site owners can get a cut by having search engines bid for their site search.
If Steve would have put the “knockoff” Cheerios down for a sec I know what he would have said.
It’s not whether Google’s algorithms hold up, it’s whether they can garner more stock in the conversation with all their attention data.
The winners of the future are not the best technologies. We’ll all be able to plug into those the same way we plug into an electrical outlet.
The winners are the services which add value to the conversations happening throughout distributed web networks.
These networks and conversations are fluid and changing constantly in response to our gestures.
Those who don’t get this are either thinking too hard or just not enough.
In a similar way that facial and hand gestures are a meaningful supplement to spoken conversations, the gestures which we talk about with attention are the metadata of the conversations happening on the web.
That equates to economic power because markets are conversations.
I agree with Jason Calacanis that many in the SEO business are trying to game this system, but I disagree when he says the system works. People are trying to game the system because it does not work. It just works better than the previous systems.
I can prove it Jason. I’ll write a better piece on a new cell phone than Engadget and see which shows up higher on Google.
No. Those dynamics are only part of the game.
The richer system envelops us with answers using our data and our network’s data in a chameleon like fashion, never static like Google. That’s child’s play.
Jason(Argonaut) succeeded in getting the Golden Fleece but was fickle and left Medea for another Princess.
Likewise, in the shorter term companies may succeed by amassing link attention.
The true winners won’t be seeking the Golden Fleece at all. They will be removing the barriers and letting the crystal waters flow in, filtered and clean, Pure Conversation.
The Human Rights Amnesty report claims the war on terror is draining attention from other issues.
Perhaps the governments of the world need to join GestureBank. They gotta be in it to win it.
Then, apply a filter based upon the anonymous pool of attention metadata and figure this all out.
There are some important discussions happening this week about open formats for attention metadata.
ET better phone home because the clock is ticking on everybuddy. The “Duh” Vinci code is unraveling.
I’m closing comments soon. My contact info is mobile:203.219.5159 email:mattatglistndotcom IM:mterenzio@gmail
So, Im back from RSS Alley and OPML Camp today.
I did not blog from the conference simply because the conversations were so rich and thought provoking that I didn’t want to only give them partial attention.
Attention itself was in fact a big topic and there is some big news coming our way on that topic. Other topics included namespaces, the spec, RDF and tags. Oh and Second Life seemed to permeate the breaks. I even talked a little on SSE, and I think we might see some progess on SSE used with OPML soon.
Special thanks must go to Adam Green, who did a great job organizing and Berkman for hosting, and Halley Suitt and the Top Ten Sources folks for hosting the party.
And if Dave Winer is listening, we all thanked you for RSS and OPML in general. Great work.
The whole weekend was truly inspirational.
But speaking of conversations and attention, this one is nearly over for me.
Perhaps a couple transitional posts and I’ll be moving on.
A couple things are for sure. OPML and Reading Lists (Glists if you ask me, Beeds if you ask James Corbett) have a huge future. Attention and gestures have a huge future. Grazr has a huge future and Second Life-like environments have a huge future. I’d like to be in the middle of it all.
Or I could just hang out on the podcast.com platform(search for podcast in second life) and listen to streaming music.
Either way.
Dear everybuddy,
When I got home from Syndicate, I had an email from Adam Green. He wanted me to help out with a session at OPML Camp about the relationship between OPML and Attention.
So I’ve been thinking even more about Attention.
If you’ve read this blog, you know those two topics are pretty big for me, but this blog is really about conversations.
And I think I’ve done a good enough job making my point (at least to myself) about the importance of conversations in the new economy.
Now I must move on and tackle a related but different subject.
I’ll continue to post during OPML Camp here, and then I’ll wrap things up.
Not sure of the name of my new blog or where it will be, but I have a few ideas.
If links weren’t dead, I’d have to thank Dave Winer for the biggest traffic day, when he pointed to a one minute snowstorm movie. (step aside RocketBoom)
Thanks to all who participated here, especially James Corbett, Alex Barnett and Danny Ayers.
I’m sure the conversations will continue when you find my new home.
Sincerely,
everybuddy.org
P.S. The Old Media Doomsday Clock will continue to be active.
No real point here, just some things I jotted down while at a few sessions.
Attention is browser click streams, user behavior with RSS, group behavior and collaborative filtering.
The user is in charge, says Steve Gillmor.
Attention then, according to Attensa’s Craig Barnes, is for the user, not for targeting ads.
RSS overload, he says, will dwarf email.
He calls the data Attention streams, which is more than what sites you visit, but a greater collective of behavioral data.
Josh Schachter of del.icio.us calls tags “crystalized attention.”
Attention Trust four key principles:
Property
Mobility
Economy
Transparency
Doc Searls–
search isn’t dead, it’s just not live, says doc searls.
On the live web, the demand side is supplying itself.
there is a new economy evolving around the live web.
same as old economy, only networked.
power isn’t redistributed it is re-originated
value chain is replaced by the value constellation
attention and intention
intention economy is about customers ready to buy
depends on gestures
promises the demand for advertising
100% click throughs
If GestureBank frees us from data lock-in, I tend to think that the “black box” of a closed-source attention filtering algorithm will be the next thing that needs to be transparent.
Steve Gillmor tells me that market forces will take care of that. We can compare the various services and choose the one we think is right.
Fair enough, because we won’t be locked in to one data vendor, but subtle differences that have an effect over time may not be obvious in the short term.
Furthermore, when the time comes for the gestures we aggregate to apply a filter to a new intention we have, how easy will it be to shop around the different filters.
I’m not yet fully convinced.
The general consensus at Syndicate is that metadata has already taken over the most important old media function, which is editorial control.
Users rely on sites like Digg to decide what the “front page” is.
Metadata = gatekeeper for what’s important.
What a week ahead for RSS and OPML in the Northeast. Syndicate in NYC and OPMLcamp in Boston.
May 15 2006 10:40 am |
RSS and
OPML and
Attention |
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