Corbett’s Crater longtail effect

Damn. I want my own crater now.

I wonder if there is a bunch of kinetic energy left over from the impact that fuels James Corbett’s blogging.

The Google ReWriter and SSE

James Corbett asks where the integrated read/write web tool is, and claims Google Reader will morph into it.

He also claims comments are dead this year. I don’t like them either but I think that’s aggressive.

James, if you and Tom Morris want to eliminate comments, I think we could do it with SSE, like I showed at OPML camp.

We are blogging on three distinct platforms (Wordpress, Typepad, OPML community) so it would be a great start if we could get it to work between the three of us. Then we can widgetize it with Grazr ; ).

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.

OPML Camp and I quit

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.

A distributed turning point? A second life?

What is James Corbett up to?
It almost looks like he just created a model for a distibuted marketplace using reading lists, known to cool people as beeds and to others as glists.
I tend to be excitable so I’m going to spend the rest of the night thinking about this before I comment on whether I think this is a big deal.
In the mean time, I’m going to spend 1.5 hours on Second Life. If I can’t see the big deal in that amount of time, it isn’t for me (but I typically miss boats - I always liked U2, but it took me till Joshua Tree to recognize they were more than an 80’s band)

The metacommunity concept as a framework for OPML based communities (part 2)

(part 1 is here)
First, let’s address why we need communities smaller than the blogosphere istelf.
As the number of use cases that can be made for blogs continues to grow with initiatives like structured blogging, microformats, SSE and the recent web clipboard, will this necessitate a change with the way we interact with the blogosphere?
In other words, will it become more common for blog readers to only want a subset of a particluar blog’s feed?
If blog use becomes what startups like Edgeio seem to be implying, then the answer is probably yes.
Consider an example where a particular blog routinely posts about tech, family, cooking recipes and also sells hand made products.
You may only be interested in the tech post and not the recipes.
Tags help, but are both ambiguous and impractical.
Collective intelligence in tagging and bookmarking can help.
We often need a tighter loop with less noise and more signal.
This notion is prompted by Scoble and Winer saying the blogosphere is adopting some of the negative usenet and mail list traits.
By it’s virtue of being so open, it will necessarily grow in noise, much of which could be created by good citizens using the system for structured blogging.
We can’t expect everyone to maintain a blog for every topic they wish to contribute to, so we either need to filter in a very sophisticated manner, or evolve into complex, segmented metacommunities.
It seems to me that reading lists can play a big role in creating metacommunities, acting like a topic-based buddy list.
In this way, we can direct some posts toward actual communities, even if they are still available to the greater system.
And once we have an open standard for explicitly replying to a post, rather than implicitly assuming such from a link, tightly bound, threaded conversations can co-exist with the general posts that are common-place today.
(end part 2)

The metacommunity concept as a framework for OPML based communities

A new concept is sprouting in the OPML landscape.

The allusion to flora is not accidental, even if banal.

Consider these two unrelated posts, the first from Lisa Williams,

OPML’s biggest impact will be in making it as simple to add a record to a self-assembling worldwide directory as it is today to write a blog post. (Did that make any sense at all? I hope so.)

Yes, that makes sense Lisa.

It sounds like an “organically” created web directory, seeded and fed by the natural actions of an ecological-like community.

Next we move on to James Corbett, commenting on one of my posts,

I’ve been wondering if we should label these multimedia Reading List as…. SEEDs = Sensory Feeds. Seeing as SEEDs are the fruit at the leaf nodes in a tree I think this will tie in nicely with the direction some feed grazers are going. And as a SEED meme accumulates momementum it can actually spawn a whole other OPML tree, just like a real SEED.

Before we get lost in this placid garden imagery, we must also note one of Corbett’s posts that indicates there is also a food chain, or feed chain, if you will, that is in intense competition for our ravenous attention.

He concludes,

Of course the fleet footed Feed Aggregators won’t die out, they’ll just evolve Feed Grazing capabilities.

Our current crop of aggregators are likened to reptilian eating machines. The next generation of consumers, the mammals, will use adaptability to flourish where the reptiles could not.

Man, however, is the only creature in history to have conquered agriculture. Thus, the information consumption tool that wins will not only hunt and forage, but harvest.

This, I think, is a key conceptual transition that must be made to address the growing attention inundation issue.

To consume what is available naturally will not be enough. Social structures must be built to enhance the bounty which abounds.

Adam Green’s River of Feeds is certainly pointing us in the right direction. Annotated lists turn that river into a mill. Lisa Williams hints that we are at the dawn of a new type of information economy, one built upon the small actions of the masses. And so we stand at the launch of a new era, similar in many respects to the industrial revolution.

Large economies of scale, mediation and complex societal structures were produced by the historical industrial revolution.

In this metaphorical one, we will produce some of the same, but moreso, an ecosystem. Both economy and ecosystem, stem from latin for household or habitat.

It seems to be largely held that these social communities can be sown out of the metadata that exists like tagging, linking and subscribing.

I’m going to conclude this post by contending that a more definitive gesture will arise that will create smaller communities among the larger ones that we conceptually know of today.

In fact, I’m going to borrow a concept from the science of ecology called the metacommunity [PDF].

{End of Part I}

Don’t upgrade until Web 2.1

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. ; )

Social Tagging and the Semantic Web

A rather brilliant piece to chew on by James Corbett on Social Tagging.