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.
Alex Barnett gives his take on the current status of the semantic web.
I can only add one observation.
We often say about site users that to successfully gather metadata, we need them acting in self interest.
For example, the del.icio.us users are tagging for themselves, and everyone benefits from the collective wisdom that can be imparted.
The same should be applied to site developers and designers and even plain old bloggers.
They will only add the extra effort of making their data available in a semantic web friendly format if they can see a return on that investment.
They only cleaned up their designs when they needed to rank high in search engines.
They only linked and permalinked when it was obvious what the benefits were.
In other words, if Google started heavily favoring semantic friendly content, there would be a rush to incorporate all the great ideas brewing out there.
It reminds me of Heiman Roth in Godfather II.
I didn’t ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business
Until business folks can see an ROI, it’s tough to get them to act altruistically. However, I will leave open that the citizens can be the leaders here and create the market, as is happening with so many other fronts.
Then the business folks will follow.
Dan MacTough is dynamically building RSS Search queries from Delicious bookmarks. OPML is being used as the glue. At least I think that’s what is happening there.
There is a lot to think about here. This type of activity is exemplary of how we will consume information in the very near future. I think.
Scott Karp says we are still in the 1.0 stage, not 2.0. Well, who knows?
One thing that caught my attention:
This is why Media/Web 2.0 needs Marketing 2.0 — we need a new economic paradigm for valuing attention, which will create a new paradigm for value creation in Media/Web 2.0 and enable the “the good stuff will rise to the top,” as Tom Glocer puts it.
So what is this new paradigm? I don’t know, but if Alex Barnett is right, it involves letting go of the Old Media paradigm completely. It involves realizing that blogging is more 1.0 than 2.0, and that the economics of Web 2.0 are still utterly 1.0.
What I’ve been noticing lately is that there is too much good stuff out there. It’s impossible for any Attention engine to possibly give me “only the good stuff.”
If I gather all the articles and posts in one week that I consider worthy of reading and limit my Attention engine to just that number, I’m still overloaded.
So, it seems to me, that an Attention engine will not only know what I’m interested in right now, but what kind of depth I might be looking for.
Check his Calendar. Got a meeting in ten minutes? Show him the unread items from the people attending. Still have four minutes? Show him a few posts relating to the topic.
Save that post about OPML feed grazers till later when he has time to enjoy it because nobody in the meeting even knows what OPML is and he usually likes to write a blog post right after he reads a good post about OPML. No time for that now. : )
Which is to say, it’s more than bubbling good content. A good Attention engine will know to hide some items that you would love to read, but just can’t afford to now.
It may be that enough time goes by that these items become irrelevant and are never shown to you, or only at some later date when you aggregate a topic for reference in an essay you are writing.
There is nothing out there right now that even comes close to this type of behavior, that I would trust to hide certain items from me.
And this is why we are so excited about feed and post grazing. It condenses and expands topics making the wealth of good content more manageable.
But even this is not enough.
I say that this is Attention 1.1, if I may continue along Scott Karp’s path of numbering.
Like the reference to Alex Barnett’s contention to let the Old Media paradigm go, Attention 2.0 will be letting go the idea that we can filter everything or even that we can humanly keep up with everthing that we would find valuable.
The River of News , Feed Grazing, and the Attention engine in general all indicate that we admit we can’t keep up.
The blogosphere and the network in general are pushing our limits of how large of a social network we can really have without being overwhelmed.
While it’s easy and natural(sometimes) to form your social network offline based upon whose company you enjoy and the fact that you are, at any given time, geographically limited to one location., there is a harder decision coming down the pike, since your judgement of other’s online largely resides in whether they have something interesting to say.
Either you or your Attention engine is going to have to make that decision. And some really great conversations are going to have to get filtered out, not just the ones you don’t want.
Some Reading Lists (*glists) will become social networks that need dynamic filtering tools added to them.
Other Reading Lists will be tools for social networks that act as the filters themselves like an email list does today.
Wrap these items up with the collective wisdom that can be distilled from them, as James Corbett has been pointing out lately with del.icio.us, and you may have arrived at Web, Media, and Attention 2.0.
But I wouldn’t upgrade until 2.1 or 2.2, because they are still finding bugs. ; )
