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.

Governments need to join GestureBank

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

Reading Lists are cool

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with Reading Lists on Dave Winer’s OPML Editor.
Basically, they are a way to share lists of RSS feeds among news aggregators. These lists reside in a live, linked OPML file.
Among uses:

There is much more potential here. We are just scratching the surface, as you’ll see once you begin to understand this simple yet powerful way of sharing feeds. Love it.

GoogleBase: Newspaper Classified Doomsday Machine

The year continues to start off optimistic for Newspapers [sarcasm]. The changes in GoogleBase are ominous indeed for the golden calf of newspaper revenue.

It’s confusing. We are being begged by the world to embrace the emerging conversation marketplace, and then in a panic-like maneuver to not be left out again, we give our most valuable asset to Google for free. Though, I’m sure it will drive traffic, and the fall of paid classifieds is probably unavoidable, this just seems like we gave them too much, too quick.

Users will replace the search and browse functions of the recruitment websites with searching and browsing on GoogleBase and only click-through when they wish to apply.

When recruiters realize that they too can feed Google RSS feeds for free and that 80% of their ad traffic is coming from Google, job sites will be ripe for disintermediation.