gillmor
Scott Anderson points to this Search Engine Land post about Google moving the news sources into the search results themselves, instead of in a box on top of the results.
My reaction is that this is an unprecedented integration of the “live web,” as Doc Searls would say, into the formerly “static web search.”
It would seemingly raise the “noise level” to open this up to blogs, but then again, maybe the algorithm is smart enough to give different weight to links to blog posts versus links to static resources.
That concept of weighted links sounds a lot like heading toward a gesture-driven environment, so Steve Gillmor was probably right to say that “links are dead.”
Links, at least, are seemingly entering an era of relativity.
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.
Over the past year on the Gillmor Gang, Steve has contended that a lotta things are dead, among them, links.
I can’t really speak for Office, but I always took Steve to mean that the future of Office was death, and I also thought that’s where he was heading with links.
Nay.
I’ve come to realize that links aren’t going to be dead, but they have been, even before Steve started talking about them. He was just observing current phenomenons.
Let me prove it.
1. Everyone will probably agree that the blogosphere would be hard, if not impossible to use without SPAM filters.
2. There are two common methods of filtering out blogosphere SPAM (there are three, really but we all know that visual/manual filtering doesn’t scale well with our attention e.g. email)
The two methods are using data from the collective intelligence, and algorithmic detection and often a combination of both.
3. Using collective data and an algorithm to determine the value of something is analagous, if not actually what using gestures are all about.
Conclusion: Links in a distributed social network like the blogosphere are useless without a gesture filter. A link can be a useful tool. Links as a value exchange are useless.
So, all along, even the mighty Google has been using gestures to decide which links have value and which don’t. The game has been over for a while.
In a nutshell, links are useless without gestures, but gestures don’t need links.
One final note: If you are reading this, you have used implict or explicit gestures to come to the conclusion that either the link to this post had value, or that the RSS URL had value. Period.
One final final note: Technorati uses links, no? Yes, but they also filter out Splogs, so the links already have a certain gesture value. I bet you can imagine a more sophisticated blog ranking system that not only took into consideration links, but context and behavior to determine what was up.
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.
The other day I said Media was dead. Perhaps Advertising is dead.
From the BuzzMachine comments, in response to Hugh Macleod, I say:
Once you realize you can be disintermediated, it becomes clear that the old advertising model doesn’t work as well as it used to, so you find you must provide and extract value in another way.
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
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.
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