shirky
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.
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}
I’ve been reading a lot of Alex Barnett lately ( the guy who is related to Traci Chapman). I don’t know anyone named Alex personally, so if you mention the name, I might think of his blog or maybe Attention.
Eight years ago, if you had asked me what I thought of when I heard the name Alex, I would have said “Philip Greenspun’s dog.”
A piece about social aspects of tagging triggered the thought.
Interestingly, the daily expert definitions and the Web2.0 spoof sites (Web 2.0 validator and Web 2.0 or not) attempt to do what tagging systems do not - put boundaries around the concept in a more definitive manner.(2)
I’ve never felt foolish about using the term web 2.0 and yet I’ve never felt necessary that I need a hard and fast definition in my mind, or argue over it’s definition.
Maybe the ones who argue and make fun do so because they don’t understand the important underlying principles that abound these days like the one mentioned above.
The ideas are not necessarily new, but now they are more widely understood by good site creators.
These principles were around when I bought my first web book, “Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing“, and I especially refer to Philip’s contention of a “multiple truth society.”
Without getting into the philosophy of whether this is true in a cosmic sense, it’s always been true on the web and is especially so for tagging. Clay Shirky defends this much better than I can in his “Ontology is Overrated” piece.
I remember a day about five or six years ago when I was in a meeting with various members of our newspaper organization, talking about our strategy.
“Should we charge them to subscribe to the site?”, they asked.
“Certain site users are going to be adding great value to the community.”, I said.
There was silence.
Unfortunately, I’m still trying to get colleagues to understand some of the things Greenspun introduced me to back then.
Thankfully, blogging has allowed me to find and interact with many who seem to understand these concepts much more than I .
How can I make my company understand? Cluetrain? Naaa.
Maybe I should start by sending them to photo.net.
