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.
