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 a huge success

So, Im back from RSS Alley and OPML Camp today.

I did not blog from the conference simply because the conversations were so rich and thought provoking that I didn’t want to only give them partial attention.

Attention itself was in fact a big topic and there is some big news coming our way on that topic. Other topics included namespaces, the spec, RDF and tags. Oh and Second Life seemed to permeate the breaks. I even talked a little on SSE, and I think we might see some progess on SSE used with OPML soon.

Special thanks must go to Adam Green, who did a great job organizing and Berkman for hosting, and Halley Suitt and the Top Ten Sources folks for hosting the party.

And if Dave Winer is listening, we all thanked you for RSS and OPML in general. Great work.

The whole weekend was truly inspirational.

But speaking of conversations and attention, this one is nearly over for me.
Perhaps a couple transitional posts and I’ll be moving on.

A couple things are for sure. OPML and Reading Lists (Glists if you ask me, Beeds if you ask James Corbett) have a huge future. Attention and gestures have a huge future. Grazr has a huge future and Second Life-like environments have a huge future. I’d like to be in the middle of it all.

Or I could just hang out on the podcast.com platform(search for podcast in second life) and listen to streaming music.

Either way.

IE7 feed reading view is “forced control”

OPML grazrs look out!
Well, I know most probably don’t work with XSL but I wanted to get your attention.
This latest post from the Microsoft Team RSS Blog explains how feed reading view will work in IE7 and gives guidelines for mime-types to use for RSS feeds.
I’ve brought this up before, and here is why I don’t like it.
One of the coolest and under-utilized things about delivering xml to the browser was the ability to add a stylesheet transformation to the document.
And it worked pretty well with Firefox and IE.
Now I can’t accompany an RSS feed with an xsl stylesheet and have the browser IE render it on the fly. It goes directly into feed reading view.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable or technically difficult to check for a stylesheet and use it if it is present, and only go into feed reading view if it is an RSS feed AND no stylesheet is present.
Considering how much contribution Microsoft is making with SSE and SLE and RSS for other types of applications in general, this seems to counter that thinking, by assuming the party serving the feed has only one use in mind.
I hope they don’t do this for OPML! We want to create rich browsable applications with it, right guys?

These memes ain’t random

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.