Ajax World Day 2

Steve Rubel just gave a nice talk called the me2revolution, about widgets, ajax and syndication. In other words, how to get your content or message out to where the users are, since he gives the page-view about three years before it’s dead as a meaningful metric. Couldn’t agree more.

I tried to get him to say pay-per-action mght be the future, but he still belives in ad-based content, though he seemed warmer to sponsorships.

Also, I knew he couldn’t get through the talk without a mention of Twitter. His point there was about news feeds that people are creating for Twitter, like Dave Winer’s NYTimes feed. If you don’t create it or at least enable it, others will, so there is no place for not being aware of these technologies.

It was a tough call between Steve’s talk and Adam Sah’s Google Gadgets.

Earlier, Bret Taylor of Google spoke about the challenges of Ajax. He concluded that despite all the negative aspects, it is and will be the way developers create web applications going forward. he also highlighted somenice toolkits for creating ajax applications, and of course Google Web Toolkit was on top of the list. It did look interesting though.

Next up, Google is doing a demo, and then Gregory Narain looks to be taking Stowe Boyd’s place to talk about Social Applications.

A few of the other bits of talks I’ve seen have been a bit about marketing Ajax as a whole, but if you’re here, I can’t imagine you need to be convinced of that.

Looking forward to Andi Gutmans on PHP and Ajax.

Tom Morris says buy a book and forget the conference.

Google Talk/AIM integration is no technical hurdle

Steve Rubel ponders whether the fact that GoogleTalk and AIM don’t yet interoperate is a technical hurdle.

He’s definitely right in guessing it’s not technical.

Jabber developers have had transports between Jabber and AIM for years now and GoogleTalk is built upon the Jabber protocol.

While it’s certainly not that simple when your dealing with size of the AIM/GoogleTalk user base, it also shouldn’t be that hard.

widgets = services = paradigm shift

Steve Rubel with a nice post that exemplifies what I mean in my earlier post about GrazrScript.

The web is no longer about the home page, or even a web page. It’s about services between individuals and companies, and the widget boom is just an indication of that coming paradigm.

And RSS and OPML are the laguage of these coming services.

Don’t be a cookie Jarvis!

Jarvis wants to know whether he should confront Edelman on the Wal-Mart blogging fiasco.
Doesn’t Edelman already wholly realize what a mistake it was?
If not, would you hire the company for your PR?
What’s left to talk about?
Can’t Rubel take care of this?

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.

Organized Reading Lists for River Of News fans

Scott Johnson has some sensible advice for River of News fans.
Does anyone actually organize their readers with numerous groupings and then actually use them?
The idea seems so foreign to me, but I’m not really an organized person.
I tried to organized into groups but just slipped into River of News style of reading unintentionally.
MC Hammer, Steve Rubel, and James Corbett just flow in together.

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}

Ruby on Rails train to Vermont

I took a few days off from the web to go to beautiful Vermont. Ski? Naaa, I watched a presentation on Ruby on Rails.
If was just starting out, I’d go this route. I may somewhere down the line anyway.

Steve Rubel points to some Rails projects.