The Golden Fleece

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.

I’ll be Danned

Dan MacTough channeled through Danny Ayers, or was it Ayers channeled through MacTough . . .anyway

More important than the fact that OPML may not be a good format for a particular use is that the end use always seems to be to render the information in HTML, a la Grazr, Bitty, OPod, Optimal, etc. I just don’t get why anyone would want to transform their information from a format designed for it INTO a format that’s not designed for it only to then transform it AGAIN INTO HTML. Haven’t they ever played with Babelfish? English-to-Japanese-to-French may be fun, but it’s not a very accurate translation.

Great quote, and I hear where y’all are coming from.

But couldn’t the same argument have been made for RSS. In the majority many cases, the reason for putting any data into OPML is because you want a common format to share it with others.

I know there are other options, better formats, and that you can argue that RSS lists or even HTML lists are just as good, but buzz isn’t always a negative thing. Sometimes it can signify a growing consensus.

In such cases, for good or bad, to allow the greatest number of people and services to share your data, you need to put it into the container they are prepared to accept.

So I think these renderers are just ahead of their time, and in order to show them off, the creators may have to force the data into OPML. The developers are looking forward to a day when when OPML is a highly common exchange format, and then these conversion of OPML to HTML will make more sense.