gesturebank
A lot of talk lately about how page-views are dead.
Greg Yardley suggests a solution but it looks like he’s missing an important point.
It’s not just about widgets and “share” of the page, it’s the fact that a well-built Ajax application may now substitute a rich interface for what was tens or hundreds of page requests.
So now how do you calculate a CPM? By the number of clicks on a page? (I guess Ajax will report this data back to the server)
Are advertisers going to buy into the fact that a click that delivers new data to the page makes their ad on that page worth two impressions? Doubtful.
Do we need advertising engines that deliver ads in time based or action-based way so that one HTTP request can deliver more than one ad if the user is interacting with the page for an extended period? Maybe.
Or do we need to rethink advertising in general and admit that interruption based advertising is dead in general? I’d say so.
Which is why pay-per-click is so popular and why pay-per-action will continue to grow. No doubt.
By the way, it’s not just Ajax that’s causing this death of the page-view. It’s widgets, as Greg suggests, and RSS, and syndication of other sorts that make modern web marketing almost impossible to track effectively.
What can be tracked, as always, is the effectiveness of a campaign ROI, which methods like pay-per-action help immensely.
So what’s left to do in a pay-per-action world? Attention, Gestures and Intention are the gold that needs to be mined in order to create more effective marketing.
Using that gold will help us direct relevant offers to willing individuals. What could be better than that?
We can’t do it alone. CPM is one-way marketing, and one-way is dead in all things web.
That’s where VRM comes along. It stands for Vendor Relationship Management, and it refers to a new generation of tools on the way that allow the customers to assist in the marketing relationship.
Some will resist this loss of control at first, because what’s better for the customer doesn’t seem to equate to better for the vendor. But that’s wrong because the marketplace is not an equation, it’s a relationship.
A marriage doesn’t only get better for one of the spouses as the relationship grows stronger. It gets better for both.
Page views aren’t so dead as CPM is. Long live VRM.
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
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.
Speaking of Gestures, I can’t say I totally have Steve Gillmor’s point absorbed. I’m not going to link anyway.
But my take is this.
Using links as a basis for extracting economics from citation is corruptible. Using gestures is not.
Put another way, you can’t fake attention. Furthermore, links are only one cog in the wheel of attention-share. Link data is meaningful only in relation to surrounding data, including and perhaps most importantly gestures and intention.
GestureBank, as many of you have probably heard is an interesting new project being evangelized by Steve Gillmor.
I’m contributing my clickstream as of moments ago. Still not sure how the recorder can contribute to Root.net as well. I’ll have to take a second look at that.
Where all of this will take us, we shall see.
My guess: The way GTalk’s jabber based open architecture will slowly melt down the IM silos, projects like GestureBank will melt down the silos of marketing data.
I don’t even think Steve fully realizes what potential that holds for individuals of the world.
This will spawn unforseen applications and networks,. I even have a few in mind already. ; )
For the last few weeks I’ve had an exchange set up on Root.net with Seth Goldstein.
It’s really interesting, if nothing else, to compare online behavior.
I won’t reveal any of his attention data here, except one fact.
He hasn’t visited this blog.
I hadn’t visited his either until I linked to it in this post. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we didn’t read each other’s because consumption through a newsreader is not recorded.
I wonder what he finds interesting in my attention data.
1 mail.google.com 528 visits 25.1%
2 everybuddy.org 387 visits 18.4%
3 www.register.com 85 visits 4.0%
4 www.google.com 82 visits 3.9%
5 192.168.2.20 80 visits 3.8%
I use Gmail. I blog through the Wordpress web interface. I use register.com as my domain registrar and I have development server on my local network.
Pretty boring stuff.
What he (or a marketer) would find interesting is the visit to the Food Network.
Considering my Italian roots, it’s a decent bet I’m celebrating Easter this weekend. Those, plus the fact that a recipe I looked at several times on different days includes Amaretto liqueur, a marketer might think I’d be in the market for a new bottle.
The bottle I have right now is just about kicked, but in fact I won’t be buying another. A dinner guest will be bringing one, along with some fresh italian pastries.
But you get the idea. GestureBank on the way via Steve Gillmor. Lotsa fun ahead.
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