Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab

I’ve just launched a new blog over on eWeek.com at http://blogs.eweek.com/newsgang/. In addition to writing the blog, I’ll be working with Ziff Davis Enterprise Editorial Director Mike Vizard on video and audio chats focusing on enterprise issues. For me, this is a return to the enterprise as well as an opportunity to bring together the best of the blogosphere as we grapple with the convergence of cloud computing, social media, and the transformation of 20th century platforms into the disruptive attention-based ad hoc network of today.

I’m not sure of the role GestureLab will play moving forward, but imagine that there may well be some tangents and perspectives not necessarily ready for prime time in the enterprise sense. For now I’ll keep it as is, with the expectations set very low given my infrequent postings over the last year. But as RSS has always empowered, keeping the feed in your reader will work just fine if anything pops up. Perhaps this blog will function something like Crunchnotes does for Mike Arrington. But something tells me I’ll be working hard to sneak everything past the eWeek filter, just as I’ve been doing for years now going back to Ahead of the Curve in InfoWorld and most recently InfoRouter at ZDNet. See you over at NewsGang in a minute.

Microsoft’s Yahoo takeover, whether successful short or long-term, marks an historic change in Microsoft’s perception of its role at the center of the computing universe. Certainly Google’s rise has focused the Redmond mind on the task it must confront, not just with Google’s advertising dominance but also its dagger to the heart of Microsoft’s crown jewels, Office. At its most basic level, the Yahoo deal allows Microsoft to clone Google Apps and blunt the hemorrhaging of a new Net-aware generation away from the current hardware bound Office.

We can argue whether the forced merger of MSN/Live and Yahoo’s services will be easy or difficult, but those who predict distraction and brain drain should remember that Ray Ozzie was the central factor in the IBM/Lotus acquisition that allowed continuity and pragmatics to preside over what turned out to be a successful combination. Notes and Domino achieved a critical mass in resources and seats that it needed to blunt the Y2K Exchange challenge, and IBM bought the time it needed to invest in open source and build out a platform for Global Services to ride on.

Similarly, Microsoft can use the Yahoo seats to deliver an 80-20 version of Office while financing the transition with improved response for brand advertising hung off of Yahoo media properties and rich media services such as Flickr. Banner ads don’t attack Google’s advertiser/relevance stranglehold, but they do pay for the migration to an on-demand Office clone and give Microsoft time to confront the real Google threat: control of an Internet operating system.

Where Windows achieved its lock-in based on control of the hardware base, an Internet operating system requires a different equation: the engagement of the user, or put another way, getting and retaining the attention of the user. This social contract is one where Microsoft has a fighting chance of success, and significantly, one where Google has its challenges. Recent attempts by Google to use data collected in Gmail as social graph gestures with Google Reader shared feeds underline how difficult it is to use data collected under one social contract to seed an emerging one.

Imagine how we would have felt if we were told that the data Google collects in Gmail that informs the suggested links in our private email discussions would be made available to other companies for their marketing purposes. Or the government for census data or the insurance companies for purposes of calculating liabilities for pre-existing conditions. But turn that around and ask the question differently: would users be willing to release their attention data in return for discounts, access to information, membership in special interest groups, and so on? An inversion where the harvesting of behavioral data is released by the user as what I’ve dubbed gestures.

Attention was first proposed in 2004 by Technorati founder Dave Sifry and me as an XML specification called attention.xml. The notion was that the digital breadcrumbs we emit around the network could be captured and transmitted as a simple signature of behavior: who, what, and for how long. In RSS, this breaks down into the feed, the individual post or item, and the length of time spent on the page. In other words, the attention of the user. A clickstream recorder such as the one we released in October 2005, or in fact, the recordings left by us as we browse services from Google, Yahoo, and every other site, are aggregated and processed based on the implicit understanding of the value of the service. What permission do you give us in return for the “free” services that we provide?

Gestures invert the permission model, moving past the inference algorithms of anonymous users to the direct messages of intent. Social networks represent the first cut at this paradigm: I’ll tell the service not only what my behavior is but who my friends are. The service then aggregates the gestures of my friends and streams it to me. So far so good. I can be invited to events, send gestures such as RSVPs that then are broadcast back to my affinity group, and so on. Or via Twitter, I can follow, and generate timely updates on what is happening, what is important to me, and what I want to know more about. But the behavior, the attention data, is not yet being used to filter the gesture stream. The attention data of my friends, when aggregated anonymously, enormously improves the signal to noise of my information system.

Combining attention with the social graph of validated gestures produces a new and extremely valuable economy. An economy where the price of admission is the credibility of the social contract. To reiterate, Gmail already knows what I’m interested in, what I am doing, and especially what my friends and business associates are doing via email, IM, blogging, and Twittering, all of which I am piping into Gmail and Gtalk where it is archived and increasingly made available via Google Reader. Getting permission to use that data is what is hard, not the infrastructure.

So Google has the necessary data but not the required permission. The rise of social constructs such as Facebook and Twitter provide an intermediary for such social contracts. By agreeing upfront to an mapping of behavioral signals (attention) to the explicit social relationships of gestures, services can be constructed that respect the user’s wishes and mine the anonymous aggregate data of the affinity groups that represent targeted qualified streams of intent. Vendors who want access to the efficiency of this marketplace have to respect the signals sent by those users: I am interested in this, don’t spam me with that, support these ideas that I support, introduce yourself to me via those people I respect, and so on.

Microsoft’s opportunity is that Google has changed the playing field from the one Microsoft used to dominate. It’s not so much that Microsoft is no longer the black hat but that in a world of choice, the white hat belongs to the one or ones who respect the user. That is, assuming there is a credible choice for these so-called free services. In fact, the battle is for ownership of the attention operating system, and the only dominant position possible is one of equal choice between two or more credible services.

It’s an odd kind of mutually assured destruction, where Microsoft and Google each are constrained from “winning” by the knowledge that if we can’t be reasonably confident of an alternative, we won’t invest our clicks in any one place. Microsoft can afford to invest in the Yahoo cloud, and can’t afford to destroy that company’s trust relationship with its customers. In other words, they can’t afford not to do this deal. And they can’t afford not to build an Internet OS that equally respects Windows, Linux, and OS/X, as Silverlight does. It won’t be easy for either company to keep going down this road, but luckily they have no choice as long as we do.

Conventional wisdom:

Social advertising doesn’t work because users are there for friends, not buying stuff.
Google reports weak results from MySpace deal, blaming missed numbers on bad estimates of social advertising yield.
Microsoft Yahoo takeover is about advertising.

Problems with that view for me, personally:

I don’t use search. Not externally, that is. I use Gmail search all the time, because my entire breadcrumb trail has been embedded there for 3 years now. So for me, search advertising doesn’t work, at all. My eyeballs are rarely focused on Adsense because they’re mostly focused on Twitter, gmail, and Google Reader shared items as triaged commonly via NewsGang. Mostly, I don’t search data, I search people’s searches of data.

So if search advertising doesn’t work with me (at least directly) what does that say about social advertising. For me, it works better than Google because it’s the affinity groups that I’m valuing, not the expression of my intent through keywords. Key to my information processing is understanding the context of the filter, not the descriptions of the containers or memes that surround the targets. That is the value proposition of Facebook and Twitter, which together conspire to route my attention dramatically more efficiently than previous methods.

Viewed in this lens, the Microsoft attack on Yahoo portends a dramatic shift in Redmond’s ability to capture, or nurture, its relationship with me. First of all, as far as I’m concerned, Facebook already is Microsoft. Its minimal investment may not appear to be golden handcuffs, but the one thing the FB cloud has been is stable. Of course, many folks see Twitter’s instability as a warning sign, but I see it as nicotine marketing and an object lesson for what $300 million can do when applied. I’m sure it’s not lost on Evan and Co. that getting that kind of money with no strings attached lets Facebook (and by definition them) thrive while keeping their options open while they garner market ownership.

So am I buying stuff via Microsoft-vended Facebook-housed social advertising? Probably not. How about Twitter social ads? Definitely. What are Twitter ads? Well, last night Dave Winer tweeted at The Dead’s reunion concert for Obama in San Francisco Monday night. Would I have bought the tickets if I had seen it soon enough? Maybe. Will I watch the streaming simulcast if it doesn’t crash? Probably? What’s the product? Obama. Did I buy it? You bet. I pay the next day with my vote. I pay right now by broadcasting my vote and this model of micro-community viral marketing.

The key here is that the information itself is the advertising. Through Facebook’s infrastructure and Twitter’s call-and-response follow handshake, I establish a gesture feed that attracts the kinds of signals I’m interested in mining. When the Microsoft/Yahoo deal broke, Twitter search brought me to the core British swarm that absorbed the announcement and analyst call before most of us on the West Coast were awake. Again, the people, not the data. Add them to my Twitter cloud, and I’m way ahead of the game. 9 hours for starters.

The monetization, if you will, is in the efficiency of information context. The ideas themselves are not particularly unique; when the sun rose over the east coast, and then out west, the general conversation largely repeated itself: will the Yahoo acquisitions be crushed, what will the VCs do with one less super-buyer, are there other offers, etc. But the history and resonance of the core players we value for their instincts and right (or wrong) guesses — another story completely. Arrington, Wilson, Blodgett, O’Reilly, Searls — you can match up their alliances and strategies with their reactions, and very quickly get a sense of what the Firesign Theatre called the 5th guy in the room, the synthesis of these people’s nuances, prejudices, business agendas, myopia, and humor — all of it combining into this ephemeral visitation known as What may very well happen.

Can Google control that? Not without the consent of those who control this new gestural bottom-up market. They can’t sacrifice a legitimate contract with users without undermining the very heart of their behavioral lead in data. If the person context is decoupled from the data, the quality of the lead crashes precipitously. If I felt that I had lost control of my Gmail data, or its representation in the form of identity profile, no matter how accurate in behavior but devoid of gestural intent, I would leave as quickly as I could. For if I am not represented according to my intentions, then the chances of those whose gestures I want to harvest being credible are similarly compromised. The 5th guy does not materialize.

It is precisely that calculation, and the possibility of a haven to bolt to, that drives the Microsoft Yahoo play. In this context, Microsoft’s belittled investment in Facebook can be seen as an investment not in last year’s advertising model but in the coming wave of user-vetted gestural partnership with information sources — with its much higher quality, yield, and translation to action. What Microsoft is buying is the people, not their accumulated data, and as we know from failed mergers of the past, an ongoing relationship with those people can only be maintained through a two-way contract that doesn’t violate user perception of transparency.

Live as Lifeboat:

What would it take to dump Gmail? Initially, nothing would make me even consider it. The longer I stay there, the more effective searches are for historical data - the random phone number, threads, do I know who this guy is already, clues for finally doing back expenses long after I’ve forgotten the details of the trip. I’ve only started using Google Calendar in earnest since the advent of the iPhone, so these mini-clues in Gmail go back much further.

The same is true for Google Docs — now starting to build up a backlog of documents — but I’ve used Gmail as a text repository with its spell-checking and auto-save since I abandoned Office 2 years ago. These features have migrated to Docs and Wordpress, but again only recently. So what would it take to migrate away from such a deep data store?

Wait, there’s more to tether me, namely IM. As Gtalk and iChat have converged in recent months, I’m piping most of my iChat/AIM chats into Gmail via Gtalk, where the Gmail integration persists the chat stream as part of the Gmail search store, adds threading, and blurs the distinction between IM and email by caching conversations when the other party goes offline. Invariably, the single search methodology encourages persisting phone numbers, links, project development, brainstorming, and note-taking in the chat window. The ability to pin the embedded window outside the Gmail window lets me aggregate all this data while navigating the other key parts of my UI.

Those other windows are increasingly dominated first by Facebook, and more recently, Twitter. More and more I’ve been using Twitter as an email gateway via direct messages, emulating the similar transition Facebook has gone through in inserting the body of an FB message into email. In both cases, it’s as simple as clicking on the direct message link to be inserted in the reply window of the incoming Twitterer or Facebook respondent. Although Twitter’s pipe into Gtalk has been down for the last few days, in general I have little reason to bolt and more and more reason to stay, as long as the various services maintain this piping flow in and out. So, again, why leave?

No reason. To leave, that is. But to migrate, every reason. And the Twitter virus suggests the method of transfer. Twitter’s follow/follow protocol establishes a contract between users that provides immediate benefit: you tweet something to the group of followers, I want to reply directly, I have established two-way identity credentials, I click on the @you link and then on the direct message link to reply. 2 clicks.

But wait, Twitter direct messages also leverage the hidden email address and present the same message in (for me) Gmail. I click on the link to the Tweeterer’s direct message page and respond. 1 click. This same methodology presents itself in Facebook email. In one fell swoop, the email client and social media clients are hidden behind an interoperability layer. The identity handshake is maintained while abstracting out the email client, the browser, the hardware, and certainly the so-called operating system. It’s platform relationship management, Doc.

What’s transcendent here is the relationship between senders, the social protocol, the contract between the individual and his or her affinity group of 1 or many. As long as the cloud service respects the privacy of my data in a consistent way across its offerings, I have no reason to switch. Of course, other clouds could offer the same service with additional incentives, but the baseline is user control of the social relationships. The data store is a commodity, albeit an expensive problem to maintain at enormous scale. The social relationships are the value that the user controls, the price the platforms must negotiate to access the efficiency of the next market.

Again, both Twitter and Facebook have identical interfaces to route the data via the social contract, thereby creating the beginnings of a new operating system. The user inexorably gravitates toward a single best practice; I’ve surprised myself at the speed with which I’ve migrated away from IM to this direct message model. The number of clicks dominates, as does the social context of the communication. Why gesture to the amorphous cloud when I can get much greater signal to noise by twittering or Walling to a group that has formed around gestures of interest in each other.

So the strategic investment is in mirroring the functionality of the service while abstracting out the best practices of the new uber-platform. If it’s easy and intuitive for me to pipe my TwitterGang cloud through Gtalk into the Google store, why not also pipe it into, say, the Live store. Of course, both platforms need to respect my transparency requirement, for what I want is data security as a given but identity and social security as an absolute requirement. That’s why Google’s refusal to cop to the egregious violation of my social contract by harvesting “friend” data assembled in Gmail via its Contact algorithm and using it to release my Google Reader shared items to people I may or may not want to view them retroactively is such a huge red flag.

You can’t have a 5th guy emerge until you have 4 guys already in the room. As long as Google continues to be the only player, I’ll put up with their stonewalling. But ever since WordPress adopted Gmail’s spell-check and autosave, I’ve migrated away to the container I’m typing in because it’s 3 less clicks for the copy and paste move I used to do. That’s 2 guys. Twitter, 3. Facebook, 4. The 5th guy starts to become clearer in the abstraction of the core services across 2 or more virtually identical containers. Can Microsoft play in this new sandbox? Just ask the 5th Guy.

Today we recorded a new daily show, NewsGang Live. It is designed to take the fundamentals of The Gang and mix them with the daily flow of news and views that emerge from the NewsGang application. Today’s live show focused on last night’s Democratic debate in South Carolina, and featured members of The Gang (Dan Farber, Doc Searls, Dana Gardner) as well as Obama supporter Mitchell Kertzman and Edwards supporter Dave Slusher, plus several listeners including Chris Kelley who joined the end of the show with some Republican perspective.

The format of the show grows out of the most recent Gang episode, where Jason Calacanis gave out enough of the dial-in information on Twitter to attract some 20 additional callers, one of which, Larry Miller, joined the show and contributed both to the interesting aspects of the show and my gathering perception that the show is not working effectively to capture and nurture those aspects of The Gang and its predecessor The Gillmor Gang that endear it to both participants and listeners. Today’s NewsGang suggests that a careful mixture of various elements may produce a product that will justify continuing this work, though it is not clear to me that the members of the core Gang can work effectively together in the original structure.

On the second part of the last Gang, I clearly set out my requirements for the show. Much of the dichotomy of the show’s agenda revolves around what to some (including many of the Gang members) is seen as 2 subject domains: enterprise technology and Web 2.0. In fact, the show can, and does, frequently blend these two spaces into one, with entertaining and empowering results for Gang and audience. However, another split is more fundamental and elusive, namely the fault line between so-called new and old medias. Many of the show’s participants live comfortably and profitably in one or the other of these camps, and the conflicting business models of these domains often surface in the discord that undermines the show.

There’s been a vigorous conversation on Facebook on the Gillmor Group Wall and comments on Part II of The Gang XI. I may have too thin a skin for some of the repetition and the occasional painful dig (”passive/aggressive crap” from another Gillmor no less) but above and beyond the debate about production styles and critical analysis lies the simple truth that what we’re doing here has meaning for a lot of people, particularly those of us who keep hanging in and failing as much as succeeding at this.

So now I’m going counter-intuitive by adding a new show that may well deliver all of the dilution that I’ve tried to avoid with The Gang. Back in the Podshow days, I produced a second show as part of my contract, Gillmor Daily, that I never felt was a net positive although it did produce the much beloved Attention Deficit Theatre episodes and the first appearances of Mike Arrington before I invited him into The Gang proper. Just got a call from Tom Foremski, my compatriot at PodTech for much of 2007: he tuned in to only a little bit of the first NewsGang because, as he admits, he’s sick of the whole political topic that the first show covers.

But those of us who do find last night’s debate compelling theater may listen, and perhaps the audience will build as we veer back into the tech comfort zone. Those who explore NewsGang itself have found it an efficient rollup of the media spaces, and frankly, the goal was to harness the unique and focused affinities of The Gang community to cull the excesses of both “old” and “new” medias. I’m reasonably confident I can hang on long enough without offending either camp to achieve a critical mass in the NewsGang domain; the usage has gown ten-fold in the last month, and should accelerate as users discover and follow the NewsGang Twitter feed and NewsGang Active widgets as they are adopted by other sites.

Economically it’s a real struggle right now, but I’m as confident of the eventual outcome as I was when I started The Gillmor Gang with even less indication of its eventual power and leverage. But don’t misunderstand my confidence; it may have little to do with my personal success or the security of my family or my ability to sustain this. Already my tolerance for the debate about the debate inside The Gang has reached a breaking point. Enjoyable as the show can be even in its train wreck status, I can’t sustain the acquiescence of the divergent members for ephemeral moments in a sea of crossed agendas.

NewsGang Live was conceived among other things as a valve in this pressurized container, to bleed off the excess gas emanating from the usual suspects, particularly me, who is sick and tired of being petulant, angry, and unfortunately, right about how dismally ineffective I’ve been in managing the explosive fame of some of the Gang members and the quiet wisdom of some of the others who get shorter shrift. Hopefully NewsGang will prove as successful in squeezing out the noise as it has in doing so in the information space for those of us who were hooked on it from Day One, but we’ll see. Come Friday, I’m hopeful that The Gang will reconvene. Stay tuned.

Started the day with the latest salesforce.com event at the Palace, the first of a hundred-city Tour de Force to evangelize developers into the Force.com development as a service (DAAS) platform now up and running. Marc Benioff and Marc Andreesen had a fireside chat where they seemed to be interested in the similarities between salesforce’s enterprise Web services and Ning’s consumer Web services. In fact, they are sitting on opposite sides of the elephant and somehow don’t see that there is virtually no distinction. As Marc A. noted, entrpreneurs now have the ability to put a startup on its feet for virtually (keyword) no money, making investment (from Marc’s perspective) safer. Of course, Marc B.’s strategy is to grow his developer cloud, or in Marc the Other’s terminology, makes commitment to the Force platform “safer.” As Andreesen noted, all you need is a bunch of MacBook Pro’s and a Net connection.

At lunch I sat next to the new salesforce executive in charge of all things developer, and she told me of her response to the question of what metric would be used as a success indicator: “How many developers sign on by the end of the week.” Benioff blew a little smoke about how the Oracle and Sun deals represent the end stage of the last generation of dev tools, suggesting we were now moving into dev services. I say smoke because it was gratuitous to raise the competitive spectre at the very moment when the combination of services and Eclipse rendered the old way improved not deprecated.

But Andreessen is also subtly overselling when he interweaves the notions of services and social. Of course the massive scale of virtualized services resembles social networks. To the user they are identical. Abstracting salesforce’s servers or Amazon’s or Ning’s or Facebook’s or, most tellingly, composite services that aggregate all of these sources and more into a service architecture that runs on top of all these social networks — that’s what is now enabled. Benioff acknowledged as much, and in so doing, presaged the real dynamic of the next few months, as producers make distribution deals for their new pictures.

I use the record/movie business analogy because the lesson of Apple’s MacWorld announcements is that services are the commodity, and targeted visibility drives the revenue. If software is marketed as entertainment then how does it reach its audience? If Ning and salesforce have no distinction, then an information service that visualizes digital theater licensing workfow inside a distributed corporation (Dolby) is virtually indistinguishable from a movie rental platform that sits across Apple TV, Air, and iPhone/iTouch.

Viewed as such, the salesforce developer pitch is to incent code creation that can be reused across both consumer and enterprise domains, because the differentiator is access to the executive decision makers via their committed information delivery systems. Should a business process identify the signature of a merger/acquisition target, the strategic marketing opportunity is to present the rollup of the business imperative of the deal as quickly as possible to a virtual consensus of decision makers. It’s business process modules as a service, abstracted across the alleged domains of business and pleasure.

Ended the day with Dave Winer’s first public demo of his FlikrFan screensaver project. Where Force demos bore the breadcrumbs of Winer’s early work in source code references to SOAP, FlikrFan’s services subtly hinted at an emerging platform of dynamic RSS feed generation, or RAAS. I’ll leave that to another day, but you can be sure Dave is already several steps ahead of the market he largely created. Benioff and Andreesen would do well to pay attention.

Given Jobs’ purported secret meeting with Bill Gates in CES Vegas last week, I was on maximum alert today for Redmond DNA at the MacWorld keynote and aftermath. It helped that a Microsoft PR official denied the existence of the meeting, which only served to make it all the likelier that it occurred. Why call attention to it if there was no substance to it? Or put another way, if it did occur, and it was secret enough to escape the camera phone grid in Vegas, wouldn’t Microsoft PR have to deny it. Or maybe PR was out of the loop too a la Ron Ziegler.

Other than a pushback from an HP guy to the effect that Craig Mundie said Silverlight integration with the iPhone would never happen, there were no obvious clues in the lobby after the SteveNote. Of course, in keeping with the PR denial, the fact that I made up the Silverlight scenario out of whole cloth made it more than a little interesting that an HP official had actually discussed such a thread with Mundie before I had even made it up. Given the wave of exits from Microsoft Classic in recent weeks (Jeff Raikes, Charles Fitzgerald, Gates’ glidepath) my bet is whatever Mundie says may be irrelevant in the reasonably near future. But then you have to examine the breadcrumbs Jobs sprinkled around Moscone West.

For starters, the transitional upgrades to both the iPhone and Apple TV auger well for Jobs’ continued accupuncture approach to finding pressure points on the body politic of the carrier and cartel communities. Get static from NBC and competition from Amazon and the record companies… switch over to the movie rental business and resuscitate Apple TV in one nifty move. Decouple Apple TV from the Mac and Windows, and Steve sends a loud message to the record companies too: watch the iPhone go tetherless next and regain the lion’s market share. And Time Capsule combined with a free upgrade and a lowered price point suddenly turns Apple TV into a child management system in HD without having to wait for BlueRay to drop into the adoption zone.

The iPhone upgrade offers another clue in the Google containment scenario. The Maps location functionality is augmented by an additional GPS workaround with WiFi to supplement the cell tower triangulation now commoditized across every other mobile platform. Broadcast SMS keeps us connected across both the iPhone network and the downlevel rest of the market, including smart and even dumb phones as receivers. Webclips deliver application status to the iPhone home screen two months ahead of SDK apps and suggests that the value add of native apps will be integration of offline storage and rich services. Hmmm — how will that be delivered?

Flash? Nope. Java FX? Never. Google Gears? Maybe but only as a caching mechanism for text. Let’s see, what multimedia service fabric will work equally well across Windows and OS/X and Linux other than those two which Apple has frozen out of the loop? Could it be Silverlight? Does Apple want to let Google control the RIA turf with the possibility of an Android-seeded nullification of the Apple leverage over the carriers and cartels? Build it anew and have less clients than Dennis Kucinich has voters? Or partner with Microsoft and continue to exploit the advantage of control of the entire device to maintain market dominance to wield against the content and bandwidth suppliers?

More breadcrumbs: Office ‘08 ships on the MacBook Air DVD-less, over the air. Apple TV sucks down rentals (aka software) over the air computer- and DVD-less. If Entourage and the rest of Office were to move to a Silverlight platform, the iPhone, Air, iMac devices would be the Rolls Royces of computing devices in the enterprise. The Intel Trojan horse that Jobs has so strategically exploited will complete the takeover of the PC from within, particularly if iPhone 2.0 includes Intel chips. It’s hardware plus services, something the new guard at Microsoft can live and prosper with.

Like the Presidential campaign, it’s not who is most experienced or most viral or any of that. Rather, it’s who’s left after the least are gone. All the religious arguments — closed versus open in particular — are left in the dust by our desire to live as much in the future as we can. How else to explain the power of the iPhone to upend the usage patterns of 1.0 mobile devices and create a small but highly influential class of users who live as much or more on the mobile Net as they do on the corporate and home networks. With 2% device share, the iPhone has beaten and now runs a close Obama second to devices with a 43% share. One device works on the Net; the other sort of does. Game over.

Now Apple TV is refreshed with a sidestep of the HD conundrum. Switch to cable for HD because satellite has less capacity? Or wait until BlueRay drops below a hundred bucks? No need, particularly if you already have one gathering dust. Upgrade your backup and Airport to Time Capsule and watch as HD podcasts come to life around the free transport and advertiser subsidy built into the Apple TV model. Who’s threatened here? Netflix, Blockbuster, and the TV networks who better settle their ass soon with the writers before the public catches on to the fact that the presidential campaign seems to have continued right through the strike without a hiccup and with far more drama, humor, and cliffhangers. The soaps never recovered from the OJ trial, you know.

Apparently nobody considered what would happen if the razor was software-upgradeable. Nobody but Steve Jobs, that is. The best moment of the Air demo was when Steve pinched and expanded a picture with the now-familiar iPhone multi-touch move, the one I’ve seen people reach out to their current screens and unconsciously attempt to do without thinking. Free upgrades across a wireless grid of devices send a powerful message that everybody wants in on.

Just back from New York and the mixdown sessions for David Sanborn’s terrific next record. So I get on the JetBlue 8AM and about 20 minutes out, the woman two seats in front of me suddenly bolts out of her seat and runs to the rear of the plane. As she passes me she says some guy just took out a lighter and sparked it. The flight attendant calmly walks up to this idiot (one of two) and removes the lighter from his hand.

Now, those of us who follow the news remember that this scenario is Number 1 on the list of things not to do on an airplane. I’m sure some people ignore the instructions/warning that lighting up in the bathroom is not permitted, but right out in the open? After a few tense minutes scanning the passengers to see if any air marshal types seemed plausible, I made my way back to the attendants and asked them what they thought. The net was that they were keeping an eye on these two and the situation was under control.

We had been at the studio until 2 and the wakeup was for 5, so I was tired. However, I had no intention of taking my eye off these clowns, who were doing their best to look as suspicious as possible: Cheech would go to the bathroom, while Chong would turn around and look down the aisle somewhat blankly. When one would return, the other would go. The second guy made a big show of ordering as much liquor as possible, though I think the strategy on the crew’s part was to comply once with 2 small bottles and then cut them off. It worked; eventually one and then the other fell asleep.

On landing at SFO, the captain apologized for a 10 minute wait for our gate to clear, then without comment seemed to move to a different gate. After 3 hours of tension and another 3 of ebbing concern, I was just glad we were finally ready to deplane when 4 cops came aboard and removed the two. They also asked who had seen the incident — “anybody else see what these numbskulls were doing?” — and took 3 witnesses aside for statements. Tina called me to say she’d seen Jason twittering from the same terminal, so I walked down a couple of gates and had some coffee with him. As I left to go to baggage claim, I encountered the two morons walking in the terminal and asked the cops what the story was. Apparently the duo were getting written up and flagged by TSA, but were free to go.

The subtext of all this is: a) the two flight attendants (middle-aged women) had the situation firmly in hand, and b) I was watching them like a hawk and at no time saw them do what they obviously in retrospect did, which was to communicate with the pilots and they with the ground. The delay on landing was likely a subterfuge to approach these guys as quickly and calmly as possible and get them to stand up and be put under control without alarming those (most of the passengers) who had been unaware of the incident. In general, the strategy on the flight was to not escalate the situation by confrontation, but closely observe and keep the attitude low key but aware. It was impressive in its calm but alert methodology.

I still think the cops should not have let them go given the oddness of their behavior after the initial event. But everything I saw was convincing in its careful use of power, and I guess they know what they’re doing. And I sure hope these two have a real tough time traveling for at least a while.

Fred Wilson makes an excellent case for why users should be more aware of where their data is being harvested. He raises concerns about Google’s aggressive march toward what can be loosely described as a data monopoly, where the scale of the pool of data creates a barrier to entry points for the startups Fred so ably funds and arbitrages. We can forgive his wrapping this economic imperative in a clarion call for the protection of innovation, but his point is valid as far as it goes.

How far that is depends on what you think about what he calls open data. Here’s how Fred puts it:

We need an open data movement, but that may not be enough. We may also need a platform shift. The web seems so much like an end state that it is hard to imagine what that platform shift might look like or when it might happen. I am not going to predict the nature or the timing of this platform shift, but I will point out one thing. The data that drives all of the most valuable web services is contributed by users as they interact with these services. The shift that unlocks another era of innovation will occur when users begin to understand their role in this ecosystem and have the tools at hand to direct what is now an unconscious contribution in a way that insures continued innovation on their behalf.

This sounds right on the surface; who could be against open data? Who could reject the notion that we have a right to control what happens to our behavioral data when we emit it around the network? Well, the answer for some time now is Web companies have offered services for “free” that carry an implied contract: ‘you get the software, you give us the data.’ The contract to date has not been ‘you get the software, you give us the data, we give you the data back so you can take it elsewhere.’

Part of the reason that hasn’t happened is that people have been happy with Gmail and Google Apps and Google Reader and so on. The lock-in has been user-mandated, a virtual frequent flier program: ‘you keep making it better; I’ll book more flights.’ ‘You make it all work best on the iPhone and I’ll trust you some more.’ After all, the guy who’s sounding the alarm here is responding to a lock-out not of users, but the competitive dynamics of his business. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong, just not necessarily a proxy for the user. Thus the save-the-innovation theme.

Indeed, the other recent alarm about open data, in this case the social graph crisis, was sounded by Google itself, in apparent response to Facebook’s approaching a strategic (and hard-to-dislodge) developer monopoly in the social network layer. Again, users continue to vote in great numbers for Facebook’s contract, suggesting that in the absence of a competitive contract offering, why change? As long as no credible counter-offer appears, privacy and loss of data control are offset by the notion of ‘I signed a contract and I’ll keep delivering as long as they do.’

So the politics of open are trumped by the fair play of good price for good service. Microsoft achieved its hegemony by subsidizing the cost of word processing while building in presentation, spreadsheet, multimedia, networking, and eventually the operating system formerly know as Windows (the browser), all for a commodity price less than the original single app. Software became electricity. We bundle electricity with the rent or mortgage and taxes, or at least think of it that way.

Fred: “what is now an unconscious contribution.” Not so sure about that Fred. At each stage of what you call platform shift, the user knows full well what the contract is. When Office was built out, I couldn’t hurry fast enough to kill WordPerfect and Lotus and even Netscape with abandon. Short-sighted? Perhaps, but Netscape morphed into Google somehow in spite of the great evisceration, didn’t it. Dave Winer and a few stubborn just-good-enoughers outlasted enough of the groovebusters to see the day when a single laptop can generate content that will ultimately stand alongside the media industries as equal and in some cases dominant partners. That laptop may be a Mac or an iPhone and we may struggle with the contract from time to time, but unconscious? No.

If not unconscious then what? I’ve sat in a conference room for a long afternoon with Fred, and I doubt he’s looking around for someone to crack open Google or Facebook or fight his battles for him. He’s smart and direct and comfortable with stating his case without a lot of indirection. But the tone of his pitch to users is that they need to become more aware of their power in supporting a platform shift that he doesn’t make a case for (he’s saving that prediction for his partners perhaps.) The pitch again: contribute [our] data in ways that insure continued innovation on [our] behalf.

That says to me, keep doing what you’re doing, support apparently closed platforms like Apple and data moats like Google and identity gulags like Facebook, and not wait around for the empty promise of an open data movement. It obviously seems counter-intuitive and politically suicidal, but so far I’ve moved my data from one to the next just in time to take advantage of a Golden Age of opportunity and leverage that from all signs is in its early stages. I’m not looking for Fred or anybody else to insure continued innovation on my behalf; I’m counting on Fred to insure it on his behalf. I’ll take it from there.

We don’t need to mandate open data; it’s already ours to begin with. We don’t have to threaten Google if they start acting untrustworthy, as they are doing with the muddy tying of an opt-out-less “friending” link between Gtalk and Google Reader shared feeds. Instead, we just vote with our feet by pruning those contacts that are serendipitous and not necessarily worth sharing out gestures with without some more stable two-way contract. In other words, we back out of the mini-contract until Google refreshes our confidence in their judgment. The contract is self-correcting. We have to keep the contract open; the data is already ours.

Some guy on CNN:

“I can’t think of a single credential the man has. He’s been in the Senate for two years.”

Jeff Raikes in the New York Times:

TO Mr. Raikes, the company’s third-longest-serving executive, after Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer, the Google challenge is an attack on Microsoft that is both misguided and arrogant. “The focus is on competitive self-interest; it’s on trying to undermine Microsoft, rather than what customers want to do,” he says.

On The Gang this week, Mike Arrington interrupts a tangent into politics to return to the more comfortable world of tech. Sorry Mike, there’s no refuge there. On Charlie Rose, Bill Clinton talks up John Edwards to downsize the Hillary implosion in Iowa. Obama responds to Bill’s lack-of-experience charge by quoting Bill from ‘92 to the contrary. Stand by your woman, Bill.

Yes, Jeff, it’s true Microsoft is in a strong position, but it’s because of Google and Apple, not in spite of them. If Google’s strategy is misguided, then why talk about it? If Obama is so wet behind the years, then why bring up Hillary, who was there the whole time but as George Will put it, fumbled the only two times she got the ball, the Attorney General and health care?

Arrogant? Competitive self-interest is a Microsoft trademark. And the old “customers aren’t asking for it” is such a pile. Since when do customers want to spend real money on Office instead of free dynamically refreshed apps that just work 90% of the time. If that were the case, then why is Microsoft offering to trade users’ attention data for a desktop full of the latest Windows and Office? This is where the New York Times and Google miss the boat.

Microsoft, for historical and now tactical reasons, is in a strange and very powerful position of underdog in the Battle for Office. They have somehow gotten it into their corporate head that respecting the user is a viable business practice. The real war here is for the user on the ground, just like the caucus goers in Iowa. With Microsoft backend technologies reaching a critical mass just before Election Day, the voters can make essentially an equal choice between Redmond and Mountain View. And it will come down to which candidate they like better.

This wouldn’t be so important if Microsoft were operating in a vacuum, but they’re not. The primaries are about surviving the rush to the bottom, where all the candidates are vetted and we end up deciding who we like best by pushing the others down the stack. Google has been lucky so far in operating in the shadow of Microsoft’s ’90’s mistakes and more recently Facebook’s stutter with Beacon.

But while Microsoft is up-front about establishing a contract with users for their gestures, Google rolls out a feature of Google Reader that ignores users’ privacy. Suddenly the completely unrelated act of chatting on Gtalk with someone who guesses your gmail name is used as permission to reveal your shared feed’s address and data to any of the above. It’s not that I am particularly worried about it; it’s just that the only way people could access the unguessable URL before was by having it publicly shared in email or a blog post. Certainly not by a tangentially-related contract where the only opt is out by manually hiding the contacts of those you don’t want to have see your shares, or by globally deleting the whole store. Now that’s arrogant.

And while the argument will be that Google has not violated the user’s privacy legally, neither did Beacon. Both technologies are early forays into the value of gestural data, about which readers might want to look with suspicion at those who say they don’t understand what I’ve been talking about for several years. Microsoft gets it, and they’re putting their software where your gestures are. And the one who levels with its users will trump the alleged benefits of a manufactured change agent. Get it together Google, the whole world is watching.

It may come as a surprise to many of us, but not Ray Ozzie, that he has won the war. While everyone from Nick Carr to the group of consultants known as the Enterprise Irregulars tilt at the Windmill formerly known as ERP, Microsoft has suddenly emerged with some incredible momentum courtesy of Scott Guthrie, the Silverlight team, and Steve Jobs.

Six years I sat in a Microsoft offsite with Jon Udell and watched Guthrie roll out a slick Ajax-based plug-in for Visual Studio that created ASP.Net apps on the fly. It would be another 18 months before the code surfaced in production, but today Guthrie is the closest thing to Bill Gates at the server level. Asked about Silverlight as a Flash killer, he said:

We’re going to get Flash downloaded onto everything in the universe — Silverlight downloaded on everything in the universe just like Flash. There will be that runtime everywhere. It’s small, it’s no big deal. It used to be that memory was so limited, that you couldn’t have multiple of anything, but here it’s just fine.

Fine, basic Bill blocking and tackling, we’re playing Moore’s Law the Home version. But then a real smoker down the middle:

So, the choice is much more at the designer level, and I don’t know whether we’ll — we’re just investing in it, we think it’s a really great thing. Scott knows a hundred times more about it than I do.

I simply can’t recall Bill Gates acknowledging, no, celebrating a deeper knowledge. Certainly it’s a marker of the transition Bill is in as he moves to his Foundation mid year, but what’s more fundamental is his anointing of Guthrie at such a strategic level. Parse the whole clip again. We’ve got the speed and bandwidth and local storage to make the runtime trivial, we’ve abstracted other runtimes out of any power to disrupt our move onto the browser, we’re within months of injecting .Net into the Web architecture, we have an advanced server fabric and developer tooling to instantiate this platform ubiquitously at the Cloud level, and we have serious revenue at the server layer after years of investment.

What’s transformative about this handoff is the way that this work, under way for easily 7 years, so seamlessly plugs into Ray Ozzie’s memo and press launch of the Software plus Services strategy in San Francisco several years ago. We all know the aircraft carrier analogy about Redmond, where it takes so long to turn the ship. In this case, the rudder was turned just in time — 7 years ago. Similarly, the work on the Tablet PC was forged in the same time frame, the XML framework and communications servers, Hailstorm, and all the other things today instantiated by… who?

Right. Google and Apple. The iPhone is the revenge of the Tablet, as Google Apps is to Hailstorm. Combine the two, and you have a dynamic relationship that is empowering users to switch off of Office and even Windows to the new OS, where Windows and Linux and Solaris and OS/X are abstracted by SilverLight et al runtimes. Does it make a difference whether the runtime is Flash or Silverlight to the iPhone user? Does it make a difference to the user whether the document creation engine lives on the hard drive or is acceptably and intelligently cached where needed between cloud and device?

When these distinctions become invisible to users, the economics of the distributed virtualized model become impossible to stop. With the iPhone, we are already there: despite the ephemeral latency issues of the Edge debate, the on-demand nature of the experience trumps any other system based on access alone. Applications that manage collaborative communications in near-enough real time are not simply competitive with the static firmware model, they force the previous generation of apps to reinvent themselves or be abandoned.

This is not a Google Apps versus Office fight, therefore. This is an Office versus Office fight. If there is no perceptual difference between Office HardDrive Edition and Office Cache Edition, users won’t care and will move based solely on ease and lowered cost of deployment. And guess who knows a hundred times more than Bill Gates about this. Scott Guthrie and at the uber level, The Father of Replication aka sync aka intelligent caching Ray Ozzie. Not pigeonholing Ray here, just pointing out work that in Ray’s case started in the 20th Century with Notes. This is Ray’s plan, folks.

What keeps this strategy on the rails is Steve Jobs and the iPhone. The iPhone encourages Google to remaster their apps on the viral Web platform, and in the process strengthen the Safari/Firefox/Opera alliance and keep Internet Explorer pinned down. This in turn encourages Facebook, Fandango, etc. to write iPhone gateways into their architecture and stitch them into a user-controlled federation of just-good-enough applications that encourage iPhone adoption as a route around IT blocking of social media sites.

This wave of quasi-enterprise apps allows the Office Cache team to gain a foothold around IT similar to the Windows 95/Windows for Workgroups/Office 97 Trojan Horse that sealed the Office suite route of productivity apps. Again, if the server source is invisible to users, they will go with whatever user contract provides the most benefit for them. I don’t care whether it’s a Google server or a Facebook server or Salesforce or whatever combination, as long as it works on my iPhone.

Faced with such powerful forces aligned around the iPhone fundamentals, Ozzie has all the tools needed to realize his goals. Office and Windows revenue will continue to fuel the hardliners inside Redmond who seek to frame the discussion as protecting Office at all costs. But time is on Ozzie’s side, as the only thing Microsoft has every succeeded in overcoming is competition from within, and software plus services mandates that the Office elders bend, not Ray. With allies like Scott and Steve, he’s got all the power he needs.

Richard Shulman via Facebook email — quoted with permission

Towards the end of part two in the discussion about social networks, we were treated to classic Steve Gillmor in the way of “The garden isn’t walled right now” and “.. there is no technical lock-in”.

I discovered your podcasts in 2006, part of the treat of listening to you (when I was able to understand at least half of what you were talking about) was listening to the pronouncements that provoked cries of disbelief, incomprehension and outrage from the group. “office is dead” was the best example. Podcast participants would try calmly (or not) to explain to you the obvious facts of Office’s dominance, health and rosy prospects to no avail. “Office is dead” you would repeat with absolute certainty and perhaps a bit of disdain for those who couldn’t see what was so obviously clear to you.

At first I joined in with those who shook their head at the silliness of the declaration, but slowly over time I started to understand both the point and the process. You peer into the future seeking to understand how technology can alter the paradigms of the present. You look at what might possibly be and once you have a vision of that future it is transformed into the present tense. Seeing that Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop would change in importance once the platform changed from the desktop to the cloud and how office-like services could be provided separate from the operating system that was their lock on applications, you declared “Office is dead”. What was in your mind’s eye became the obvious present truth and usage facts and revenue figures be damned.

Now it’s the data lock-in of a walled garden. You’ve seen the technology that allows data to flow from one application to another and the paradigm changes that will come from that and therefore confidently declare “The garden isn’t walled right now”. Of course others on the show focused on the here and now argue in disbelief that the opposite is true and that you (not being a user) just don’t understand. A classic Gillmor moment. I loved it.

The first step in understanding you sometimes is not figuring out whether you’re right or wrong but guessing what unique time zone half of you is operating in. Whenever it is, keep straddling between the then and now. Keep doing the show. It’s always an education.

Last Friday we recorded a new show titled The Gang. I’m initially asking those interested in hearing the results to join this Facebook group. Looking forward to seeing you there.

Part two of our discussion at SFO

This iPhone War is really starting to get to me. Not the loss of trust Frank Shaw proclaims. Not the BSM (BlogStreamMedia) attempt to gin up the GPhone as the next wave. Not even Doc Searls’ Cluetrain-rattling about Google’s advertising lock as promoted by Scripting News. No, it’s just the idea that any of this is going to slow the iPhone down.

If we wait long enough, the Web 2.0 bubble will surely burst. That XML thing is too verbose, too unsupported by legitimate standards bodies, too geeky to be adopted by the mainstream. (You can substitute any of the XML infantry for the parent layer; try RSS.)

Facebook is not worth $10 billion. Microsoft will not die. Robert Scoble can’t keep a secret.

Believe this crap if you want to. But don’t bet the farm on it.

Steve Jobs may or may not be a nice guy; I have no idea and don’t care. He is responsible for the majority of the tools that I use every day in my work: iMac, Macbook Pro, iChat video, Final Cut Pro, iPhone. I await the next OS/X eagerly for many enhancemets that will translate directly into the quality of the media I produce, the value of the network I run, and the conversation I’m lucky to be a part of because these tools make it impossible for gatekeepers to shut me out of.

Since the iPhone’s release on the 29th of June, I have shifted substantial portions of my computing landscape to the new platform. Podcasting, which I am proud to have been a leader in accelerating with The Gillmor Gang, established the synching platform as a viable route-around of the Clear Channel cartel. Now, with the dreaded 1.1.1 upgrade opening the door to WiFi synching, however crippled in its initial instantiation, we’re at the doorway of the flowering of both audio and video data. The ticket to ride is an RSS feed and a business model.

Without an RSS ingress, you can’t bypass iTunes to get a track onto the iPhone; believe me, I’ve tried and can tell you precisely when the work-around broke. So for now, I’ll use whatever extant tools, like this blog, to drive syndication. Or Facebook group posts and Google Reader shares. As to the business model, well, that one’s in flux. Right now, advertising of free media is the work-around. No amount of threatening Jobs, or anybody else in the communications industrial complex will change the dynamic: if you have something people want, they’ll pay for it. With their time. It’s attention, baby, and don’t believe anybody who’s figured out how to get it reliably. Remember the guy following the elephant with a shovel: “What, and give up show business?”

Now let’s look at lightning striking twice. It’s 1968 folks, and it’s a jump ball. In ‘68, Johnson quit when McCarthy lost by only 10 or so points in New Hampshire. Bobby Kennedy came in, caught McCarthy, and passed him on the last night of his life to secure Mayor Daley’s support at the convention. The fuel: a vicious, spirit-draining war, a Golden Age of music colliding with the first cartel, and Bobby’s ability to hold together the fractious racial war in the summer of hate.

And then there were the drugs. Today the drugs are legal, high blood pressure and cholesterol medications, enteric aspirin, Starbucks sugar-free vanilla no-fat decaf lattes, and green tea with ginseng. But the highs come from social media. That’s all I’m saying folks. My wife just came out of the office saying, “I’ve got 31 friends and that’s it.” Sure. I can quit anytime I want to. I just don’t want to.

You can do the spreadsheet to map ‘68 to ‘07. My bet is Edwards is McCarthy, Hillary is Hubert Humphrey, and Obama is Bobby. Sure, I’m wrong. Office ain’t dead, and the iPhone hasn’t changed everything. But it’s all over on February 5th, and Democrats will have to calculate whether the electorate will vote for a polarizing Hillary or any of the mediocre alternatives. Giuliani did clean up Times Square, and it stuck. Do we want four years of HillaryGate or Fred Thompson and benign vacation neglect? McCain is a good man with the wrong mindset for ‘68; remember that Nixon won with his secret plan to end the war. And Mitt, well the closest Rockefeller ever got to the Oval Office was over Agnew’s nolo contendre.

The music? I’m not a big Springsteen fan, but his intro to Living in the Future on the Today Show had to have had the NBC brass squirming over their FCC license. When the blue collar meets the left in Rockefeller Plaza, it’s good to remember that John Lennon got John Sinclair sprung in 3 days from hard time and all he was saying was give peace a chance. In retrospect, Mitchell and Haldeman were not so far off in worrying about John and Yoko. At the time, I thought Sometime in New York City was Lennon’s weakest album and the only one I never bought–but Nixon realized that if the class clown gets away with throwing spitballs at the substitute teacher, the next thing is soldiers refusing to fight for oil.

The iPhone War is a war against the effective. “Breaking rational customer rights,” as my brother call it, ignores the customer rights I’ve received as a result of Jobs’ nuanced bear hug of one of the cartel’s leading players. Before the iPhone, there was zero ability to commandeer WiFi on my phone; spare me that there were small niche players who might have delivered some of that capability along with no reasonable browser, no integration with email links, no any of the other UI breakthroughs like touchscreen and photo email. Today AT&T’s 2.5G network serves ably as a stub between WiFi servers in the office, home, hotel, and recording studio. Seamless. Oh, yes, that feels better. Oh, I like this store because they bundle WiFi for the million iPhone users who value instant and constant access to information.

Then there’s Twitter, where I see Scoble complaining because the auto-complete mangled a message. Oh well, we understood, and still appreciated him cradling Milan while keeping in the game on his iPhone. Facebook is exposing more and more of its network to the platform, as is Google and those willing to put up with some of the limitations of the license. Because that’s what we are living in the future on: a license negotiated with one of the carriers, the RIAA and MPAA cartels, and some but not all of the networks. Track back from the roadblocks on the device and you arrive at a bunch of police cruisers with lights flashing, protecting the old business models. Yeah, as Scott McNeally said about privacy: “Get over it.”

Right now the blockages remaining are

WiFi synch
Flash/Java
local store

What we want WiFi synching for is the free podcast layer. Right now, it’s vendor-subsidized, first by Starbucks, then by network week-free promotions, and soon by bundled aggregation plays. NBC is playing time-shift games with its cable networks while on iTunes strike, so however long it takes for us to get sick of Journeyman and Chuck and Bionic Woman is how long it will take for the Peacock network to fold its feathers and slink back to the WiFi store. By then, Jobs will have relaxed the WiFi blockade to include TV and not just music, or maybe he’ll just use podcasts to force NBC back.

Flash and Java are Jobs’ other tool for compliance. No way in hell Java comes in while Apple holds the hammer with the cartel. Java on the iPhone lets RIM and Verizon and the rest of the cartel catch up on features while destroying Apple’s iTunes lock that drives AT&T’s acquiescence. Flash is already running in effect courtesy of the YouTube toehold, but here again Flash, like Java, is a platform leveler that shifts power away from the iTunes velvet fist to a flaccid commons where mediocrity achieves the clout to stand still.

The local store appears to be the home for copy/paste and the rest of the computer functionality not yet delivered on the device. But in fact Office is dead, caching is the true disruptor, and the cloud is the local store we’re waiting for when it’s already standing there right behind us. Predictive caching based on gestural APIs eliminates the need for copying on the client. If Facebook sets up both sides of the conversation like some dynamic RSS/SIP/gcal mashup, we can let our profiles do the by-reference parsing.

Jobs understands that the winners of this market conversation are the inheritors of the implications of the architecture. If he can maintain control of the hammer while moving steadily forward via on-demand updates, we will stick with him. If we stick with him, the cartels will have to fall back in line. Just a theory.

It’s Day Three here in New York. My friend David Sanborn is working with producer Phil Ramone in one of if not the largest room in the City. The discussion of the moment is around whether to go in and replace or just cut another version. Seems to be leaning toward a new one.

The sound is a mix of big band and the kind of feel of the early Sanborn days when many babies were made (paraphrasing the chatter in the room on several ballads.) But the description does the thing no justice; this is something old and new at the same time. There’s a kind of methodical approach to a question that hasn’t been asked.

Ramone is a sly, gently funny general with more credits than a Hollywood blockbuster — Google it for details. At one point yesterday drummer Steve Gadd suggested a new approach on a ballad, where as best I can remember it, he suggested they let the tune play them rather than the other way around. The idea worked, but the result was a track that suddenly sounded like a Phil Ramone record. Go figure; Ramone’s style is velvet hammer, seemingly relaxed and flexible with no room for bullshit at the execution level.

Now the Marcus Miller tune Brother Ray is on Take Two, not counting a rehearsal recorded as per standing instructions. There’s been some time eaten up chasing a click track from an earlier version done at Sanborn’s home studio. The business of recording doesn’t add up much these days, but as with the technology game, something will emerge.

Ramone just threatened to wait until the last day of the sessions and then spring a marathon run-down-all-eight-tracks on the band. “There’s no cure for cancer here. Now that we’ve got it all in the can, let’s do some real shit.” He’s joking but seriously.

Food breaks and playbacks typically dissolve into escalatingly dirty jokes. The horn leader is Lou Marini of Blues Brothers fame and a music camp buddy of Sanborns as a child. None of his stories are repeatable.

Some quick thoughts after a quick scan of shared feeds from a studio in New York:

NBC’s decision to dump iTunes will have the same success Times Select did, by proving that fighting RSS is like quitting caffeine. The headache goes away when you go back to doing what you did before you stopped doing it. DRM for a week on Windows is a massive commercial for anything but.

The iPhone has effectively replaced my laptop for much of my working day. The extent to which I can create the necessary metadata to do my various jobs determines what applications I use.

I’ve noticed the business value of emergent projects has a direct correlation to the simplicity and balance of the contract between sharing parties. It’s not the open source model of recent history but rather an evolution where age and passion intersect. I’m seeing so much of what I’ve worked toward from 30 years and 30 months ago intersect in recent weeks, and am finding it surprising how few historical comparables of this renaissance come immediately to mind. It’s a heady confluence of patience, resolve, and roadwork. Humor has its usual role, but not so much a catalyst as a grace note in the foundation of the work.

The notion that music means less than it once did is laughably false. Something has changed, yes, and what’s even funnier is how quickly it can change back.

Those of you interested in participating in a short private beta please send me a message on Facebook and I’ll be in touch.

I’m at Sun today for a Jonathan Schwartz keynote and panels on the emerging opportunity of the BRIC — Brazil, Russia, India, China — markets. Schwartz seems to have hit a stride of sorts where his rhetoric of the last few years has been caught up to by the results in the marketplace. Certainly vigorous layoffs and belt-tightening have had their effect, but also aggressive R&D as in research and delivery of the new chipset and a big downpayment on virtualization have resulted in a good quarter.

Today Jonathan’s thesis is that technology eliminates barriers. The delveloping markets represent the largest growing but smaller sized segment of Sun’s opportunity. That’s trillions in the US versus billions in the emerging nations. Schwartz sees the US as in danger of limiting the spread of our technologies. Talent, he says, is flowing away from Silicon Valley as a result of restrictions. At the same time, the panel talks of “the next Google” as coming from a Brazil or elsewhere. And as always, Schwartz is on the defensive about how to detect actual progress in revenue.

Market share revenue will be a derivative of market share adoption, he says. “But it happens over time.” He suggests comparing Red Hat and JBoss growth over time. Free software, open sourced Java, focus on mobile handsets. Afterwards, I asked Jonathan how he accounts for revenue for the virtualization layer; he suggested the wrapper — Thumper — encapsulating the value of Solaris and attendant technologies. I invited him to come on the next Bad Sinatra Live and he said, “send me a note.” Here it is.

I’m going to resume the conversation that used to be called The Gillmor Gang in the next few weeks. The Bad Sinatra Live session we did at Gnomedex was an experiment to see whether the old dynamics were still there and still valuable to those who have regretted my decision to shut the old show down. I’m waiting on the footage shot there to see if it can work as a Bad Sinatra, either in combination with other footage or standalone. But in any case there were enough interesting moments to answer my questions.

It’s not clear whether I can count on the participation of everybody in the same way or on the same day for that matter. Arrington and Calacanis seem busy with their conference and business models, Udell remains uninterested in the soap opera, Doc is moving his family to Harvard Square, and in general things seem to be entering a more professional phase. But I remain convinced that the quality of the dialogue among all of us is not being served by remaining on the sidelines, and I’m ready to fix that problem.

To be clear, this will not be a resumption of The Gillmor Gang; the reasons the show was stopped remain in force. But fundamentally The Gang was a representation of a conversation I’ve been a part of for years and one that continues as we speak. I like the reaction to Bad Sinatra — the same people who loved the Gang like the new show, and the rest, well, they can just keep moving. The issues that permeated the Gang also remain, but the economics of the time seem to have erased a lot of the dynamic tension that used to resonate between Vizard and Farber, between Hugh and Doc, between Arrington and Nick Carr, between Jason and… Jason. That was one big reason the Gang went dark; everybody stopped laughing about Office being dead because it became so obvious even Scoble had to admit it. I kid because somebody has to do it.

In Seattle, I invited David Ossman of The Firesign Theatre to join us for Bad Sinatra Live, and he gave the right answer: “Why not!” For both of us, there was strong resonance of the time in 1972 when we filmed the group in a live performance at KPFK in Los Angeles, the convention of the National Surrealist Light People’s Party, you know, the one where we nominated George Papoon running on his campaign platform: Not Insane! It was no coincidence that John Lennon wore the campaign button that year as he fought off John Mitchell and the Watergate crowd; this time we’re faced with a front-loaded campaign where the shouting will be over on the first Tuesday in February. Where The Beatles were the thought leaders then, today it is Jobs and Google and the iPhone/on demand/Facebook nexus that’s in charge.

Only a few recognized Ossman in Seattle, including one guy who was at the filming of the Martian Space Party 35 years before. But those who did recognized that this is a political campaign we’re in, and there’s no time to lose in getting the themes in place. The candidates: Winer, Canter, Scoble, Calacanis, Fitzpatrick — each addressed the convention, and irregardless of the drama, each locked in a certain number of delegates. Remember: someone will win this election day (2.5.08), in at least two parties. And I bet we’ll intuitively know who the winner in November will be that day as well.

At the end of the Bad Sinatra Live session, I signed off with the some familiar words: “See you again next time on another edition of The Gillmor Gang…” The folks in the room were paying attention; there was a quick intake of breath and then a laugh. They were right: it wasn’t a mistake, it was a joke.

Before Gnomedex 4 I had grown vaguely aware of Chris Pirillo. Not being a TechTV viewer (hadn’t moved to a cable system running it) I was unaware of Chris’s community, though this Iowa get-together was slowly penetrating the outer layers of the blogosphere and the tech media worlds I try and monitor. Then Gnomedex moved to Lake Tahoe and then its present home in Seattle. Now it’s Gnomedex 7, and Pirillo is blowing it all up.

“There is no theme.” Chris says from the stage as he opens this year’s conference. Not true. The theme is how to make a difference. A good question from an intuitive guy who I count on not getting, so that I can learn and wake up and get over myself and the map of the world that I project all my distortions and fears through.

The opening keynote is an old-fashioned barnburner by a self-described spy named Robert David Steele. As one who believed David Lifton when he said Kennedy’s brain was missing, I enjoyed the harrangue, a melange of Tim Leary meets Gordon Liddy as told by Olivers Stone and Hardy. He stayed mostly away from my favorite tarpits, opting instead for what he summarized as “Your government is stupid.” He wants a Cisco router that provides a rules-based approach to who sees information about himself. I question his anointing Cisco, but the idea is right. “If Cisco won’t make them, make it yourself.”

Steele thinks last year’s crew was unimpressive, inconsequential people or A-Listers on the way down (my paraphrase.) He challenges us to harvest the so-called citizen journalism revolution and cuts off conversation about common wisdom arguments about Internet radio, but undercuts his credibility with sweeping kickers like “Once one state gets it, the rest will quickly follow.” A marine’s explanation of life. Pirillo’s reboot is underway.

It’s not the Gillmor Gang, but what is.

Copyright 2007 Bad Sinatra Network LLC

Jason Calacanis, Bill Atkinson, Mike Arrington, Dan Farber, Mark Benioff, Rudy Giuliani and Steve Gillmor

iPhone download

I’ll have the AppleTV version up on BadSinatra.com in a bit.

iPhone download

A few weeks ago I wrote a post called iPhonomics. A few days later I was chatting with Andrew Keen when he casually mentioned that would make a good title for a book. Although I have no intention of writing a book (that’s real work) I thought I’d check out the domain on Go Daddy. To my not so much surprise, someone had grabbed it. I called the guy up and asked him why. He said he thought it was a good title for a book. I asked him if he would release it back to me. He said he’d think about it and call me on Monday. He never did.

Several years ago at BloggerCon (the one where Adam Curry talked and Scoble did a session on information overload) I coined the term podosphere in answer to a question. As I spoke, a guy two rows down and 10 seats over grabbed the domain. A year or so later he sold the domain to someone else, who contacted me and asked whether I was interested in working with him to do something with it. I declined.

Several months ago Doc Searls and I came up with a name for a new show I have been developing. I grabbed it that night as soon as I got home. Tomorrow that show will launch: it’s called Bad Sinatra.

In the Gesturesphere, we all make contributions to the state of mind we call this social network of ours. You can call it attention, or intention, or VRM, or Twitter, or whatever. But it still represents our hope to make some difference, to leave a footprint in the cement out in front of the theatre of our lives. We take it a lot more seriously than we let on, but like high school we pretend that it doesn’t hurt when we’re insulted, passed by, snickered at, or worst of all, not noticed.

Gestures have become big business. The politics of personality swamp us with messages that need to be triaged much like we used to parse advertising. Is this the program wrapped in signals or signals disguised as programming? Yes. It’s an ugly space we’re in, and nobody holds the high ground. We’re all selling something, and of course it’s ourselves.

Gabe Rivera invited me into Facebook to show me the news feature and the general ecology of the system. I appreciate the gesture. As part of the setup, I gave FB access to my Gmail contact list and it converted the entire list into friend requests (with my permission of course.) At first I went name by name and deselected the ones I felt awkward about, but at the end I said the hell with it and just sent them all out. I’m glad I did. I have Twitter to thank for this, and before that LinkedIn, where the difficulty of delineating “friendship” gave way to simply saying yes to all. Come to think of it, if the contact is made, it represents a gesture of friendship at its heart, no matter what the cascading motive beyond it.

Once you’re over the initial phase, Facebook begins to tease out more metadata, the context of the relationship and then the fleshing out of the category with detail. I’m still resistant to the early attempts at coaxing content — write something on my wall and this zombies thing, for example — but the system’s mechanism to clarify such choices as “You met randomly” produces results like this:

Gillmor is my favorite “asshole” and I mean that as the highest praise. I heard a rumor that he’s starting a new podcast with Doc. I pray this is true. A real man with a real voice in a sea of ridiculous poseurs. I would listen to him everyday if I could. He’s funny And mean. I like him.

Fantastic. And then I get a request to confirm this comment as accurate. You bet I did. The joy of collaborating with a robot to produce fine comedy is exhilarating. And to Tree Shapiro, the author of above, thank you sir for your discerning genius and fuck you as well. See you in the Gesturesphere.

I’ve been stealing cycles throughout the weekend to read Andrew Keen’s much-loathed book in preparation for a 4- or 5-way deathmatch this Tuesday at 7:30 in Campbell California. The venue is a Baskin and Robbins — no, a Barnes & Noble, and the players are Andrew, Nick Carr, Keith Teare, and me, moderated by Dan Farber. I’ll reserve my comments for edgewise insertion on Tuesday, but so far I’ve been surprised at both the dismay on the part of A-Listers and the effectiveness Keen has shown at dragooning people such as my brother, Doc Searls, and Jeff Jarvis into promoting the work into the mainstream conversation.

I can understand my brother’s dismay at being simultaneously bludgeoned for championing citjournism and unfairly lumped in with Keen’s indictment of amateurs in the journalism space. In fact, my brother’s lending of his mainstream journalism credibility to the blog space early and then fulltime was one of the first and most significant validators of new media credibility. But I guess he can’t say that himself without appearing petty and self-promoting, so I’ll say it for him. Those of you who know both of us know that while I often find myself looking at Dan’s issues from another perspective, nobody can touch him as an ethical source of how to do what he does (journalism) right across the alleged divide between old and new medias. Keen loses points there that he will need to make up moving forward.

But Dan’s refusal to be engaged in the continued discussion falls flat with me, as it does when Doc demurs as well. Just as it doesn’t follow (in Keen’s work) that because mainstream media is finding it hard to survive on the realtime network, that the flood of amateurs from below is responsible, it also doesn’t follow that the wisdom of the crowd is enough to replace the inefficient media or that the frictionless voice of the Wordpress onramp has no conflict of interest of its own.

Keen is finding this odyssey something of a Nixon goes to China moment, where his more authentic exploration of the weaknesses of both sides on his road show is preparing the way for a real dialogue minus the posturing on each end. Tom Foremski’s emotional post about the Chronicle layoffs is one signpost along this more profitable road, and those who duck the old debate should only feel comfortable if they join a more productive “now-what” discussion on the other side of the mirror Keen suggests we are holding up to ourselves. Frankly, I’m sick of the debate, but if that’s what it takes to get to the real work ahead, so be it.

Mike Arrington is tall. He’s also devious and complex. Today he called me a journalist as he blithely ripped off my hilarious “but what has that got to do with the iPhone” mantra. That TechCrunch page view laundering operation is some kinda smooth deal. In goes the smoldering work of a lifetime of bullshit detection, and out comes another good day at the click farm.

Last night Mike wrote up the rumored Google/Salesforce deal, and amid the correct assumptions about the announcement he threw up the notion that Google Gears might be part of the deal. Smart thinking on Mr. Mike’s part, but with the 9PM embargo lifted on the actual details it’s clear that Gears has nothing to do with it.

All I can say, is “what exactly does that have to do with the iPhone?” Everything.

Mike’s comments get right to the heart of the matter: battery life. In a world post-iPhone where everything changes, battery life becomes the arbiter of usage. iPhonomics becomes the process of reducing battery usage to acceptable fill-ups at power oases throughout the daily lifecycle of the device. Let’s say the phone gets 20% of usage during the day and evening if out and about. That leaves 30% for Web and the rest for iPod, of which 40% might be audio and 60% video.

Plane usage tips toward iPod. Here’s where Gears comes in, as Google Apps suck up most of the airtime and you can charge the iPhone while you browse offline. At home, Apple TV shifts away from iPhone video in a similar complementary fashion. Soon it’s bedtime, and tomorrow the cycle begins anew.

Is iPhone a Blackberry killer? Yes. Most of the time now, I lug my Mac around with me in suspend mode, never taking it out except to tank up on AppleTV (and soon iPhone subs.) Gears means inevitably that text and soon images will be cached across the surface area of my environment: laptop, AppleTV, iPhone.

Recently I missed a two part Grey’s Anatomy that my wife had seen half of while I was traveling back from NY. (JetBlue doesn’t carry ABC, just the other three.) Somehow the DVR was erased. I downloaded it from iTunes and forgot about it. If the next two disappear, I’ll do the same thing.

Blackberry = DVR. Will AppleTV kill Dish Network? Yes. I’ll upgrade to HD any day now, not caring that the DVR will go from 100 to 30 hours. The secret of the iPhone is that Gears and Dish and Google Reader, Docs, and Gmail and AppleTV are all peripherals for the iPhone. iPhone therefore I am.

I always thought the day would come where I finally had enough bullshit from the various companies trying to game the attention model. This afternoon I had a long (2.5) hour chat with Loren Feldman. As some of you may have noticed, Loren is not a big fan of the non-profit AttentionTrust, which he called a joke in a recent video post. In the chat today, I found some common ground around the notion that even though the Trust was in Loren’s opinion hopelessly conflicted by co-founder Seth Goldstein’s participation in a number of attention startups, the basic idea of attention was in fact a powerful trigger for what I believe is the successor to the page view model.

What’s wrong with the page view model, you might ask? Nothing, if you have unlimited time for cruising the Net for actionable information. Attention for me has never been about getting attention, selling attention, or any of the Attention Economy constructs put forth by Goldstein, Goldhaber, Dyson, O’Reilly, and others. The last two years of conferences on the subject have provided precisely nothing of interest for me beyond my original impulse: harnessing the power of each person’s “karass” to reduce noise and prioritize information beyond the algorithms of page rank, techmeme, and RSS rivers or mail UI interfaces.

That was, and is, the goal of my work in this arena. Getting there brings politics into play, and here I’ve tried to emulate the strategies and innovative obstinacy of Dave Winer as practiced in the RSS wars. Attention.xml, the Attention Recorder, GestureBank — each phase of this campaign has been designed and supported by me only as a vehicle for abstracting out the notion that users can, and will, take charge of their implicit behavior, or gestures as I mandate them. As Loren says in today’s chat, the signals of an endowed and hand-raising few are inherently more interesting to me (us) than the mass culture of enticed reactors.

At Rafat Ali and Staci D. Kramer’s recent conference, I met and sat next to Jason Calacanis’ Weblogs-Inc. partner Brian Alvey. At dinner one night he told me about a SXSW panel he attended that dealt with a mashup of attention and identity themes. From his description of the event and a little research, I deduced that the thorough summary of my thinking on gestures was delivered by AttentionTrust board member Mary Hodder.

A few days ago Brian sent me a pointer to a New York Times article on identity that quoted Kaliya Hamlin sounding a similar note. These two datapoints, plus a long conversation I had with Kim Cameron at the last Internet Identity Workshop (and a follow-up this week), convince me that we have internalized sufficiently the fundamentals of what I find compelling about attention. Brian wonders why I am not cited in these discussions; I wonder why it took me so long to get over the embarrassment of being shunted aside and get back on track.

Rather than pointing out the deficiencies of the various attention startups surfacing these days, here is the lens through which I view the credibility from a user-in-charge perspective:

• Who owns the data?
• How is the data distributed should the service-offering owner be bought?
• Is data being collected in return for one service and distributed for another?
• Can data be resold or laundered to remove user control over distribution?

I’m sure there are more granular delineations of data flow, but in practice I can usually spot questionable terms of service in About statements or privacy policies from these bullet points. I don’t mean to suggest that these are legal violations, as most attention services make reasonably clear what you get as service in return for harvesting your data. Much of this is common sense: you sign up for Gmail, you understand you’re getting a so-called free service in return for sharing your behavior with Google. Twitter: a soapbox for a social media map of your cosmos.

But I’m less concerned with the legal trail of these clicks than the utility moving forward of the accumulating data and what directional data it holds within its social map. In the wake of the collapse of the operating/Office system, I am looking for the network effects that derive from orchestrating attention signals to accelerate discovery, incent affinity-derived content creation, and indemnify contributed data from pollution by laundering and then merging with formerly clean user-managed data. Whether the attention service has a legal responsibility to handle collected data with the user’s interest in mind is not crucial; how the attention service appears credible to users is.

Put simply, GestureBank was conceived and implemented as a mechanism to insure initial and continued contribution of anonymous data to a user-controlled aggregated pool. Such a data pool survives the most rigorous tests of data flow and integrity. Data queries and services produced by affinity services aligned with GestureBank must not be corrupted by co-mingling with less rigorous attention collection strategies.

To mandate this “clean” requirement, GestureBank will release a GBX2 Firefox add-in that adds header data to each request (click) that specifies the user’s issuance of a specific license to receivers of that request, allowing use of that data as long as the principles of user control remain in effect. To reiterate, this is not a legal requirement, although it may ultimately pass that test, but a direct communication of the user’s intent and a lens through which the user subsequently can view the credibility and integrity of entities who seek to use that data subsequently.

With this stamp of user-control in place, I can now go back to working with like-minded affinity groups without concerning myself with conflicts of interest or attacks from those who would obfuscate the attention opportunity with complexity. If you do your own homework and examine attention service offerings, you can quickly assess the validity of the user contract. Then it is up to you to decide how, or if, to trust the integrity of the service and its shared data.

If GBX2 is in the chain, you can then go to the successors and query them as to how they support the terms of the user license. If they ignore the data, that presents an opportunity to ask why? If they refuse to provide their services to GBX2 users, that speaks even louder. Conversely, those services who respect the user license will be rewarded in turn.

Today the Web woke up to a real story about itself. Microsoft has put forward a powerful challenge to the notion that Google will steamroller Windows once it’s done with Office. Scott Guthrie made a strong case for developer extension of the rich browser, and Ray Ozzie cracked open the tiniest ray of hope that Office apps could conspire with Silverlight to create lock-in around the new Web runtime.

In the absence of competition, this could have been a frightening moment for those who dread a return to Redmond control. The short-term losers are Sun (the Java runtime, hello) and perhaps Adobe on the tools side. The mid-term threatened certainly include Apple and Salesforce, where their versions of rich and reach depend on a level browser playing field. What happens if we start lusting for that extra oomph of a Silverlight UI on a video-based information service we’ve somehow gotten addicted to?

I’m not so much concerned about the Windows experience; it’s the Mac runtime that really tunnels in, and the forthcoming Ruby on Rails support in the DLR, that bring the aggressive Charles Fitzgerald out to tell Farber why this one is inevitable once more. After all, as Ozzie implied in the Q&A with Arrington, what’s the competition? Twitter?

The engineering behind this is stunning. This is no Hailstorm, no crash dive all-hands-on-deck save the cheerleader, save the company drive from the Gates playbook. This is a Microsoft 3.0 iteration, with Visual Studio and Firefox tied at the waist. This is both the good news and the bad news, for either the Web or Microsoft but one not the other. In this new alignment, Google has to make a decision quickly–to release the Firefox persistence engine now. Ballmer’s dismissal of Google Apps is the one shrill note in this broad masterstroke of a rollout:

A: They’ve come out with what I might call — what’s the politically correct way of saying it? — they’ve come out with some of the lowest functionality, lowest capability applications of all time. (Laughter.)

I’m not one to remotely dismiss Ballmer, but he’s speaking into my wheelhouse and missing the big boat. I just upgraded to Firefox 2.0 after months of biding; all of a sudden spellcheck is working inside Wordpress without a plug-in. When I reboot unexpectedly, my tabs are auto-restored; when I click to close each individual tab, the focus shifts back to the tab that launched the new page (Google Reader impact.) On a day when I can see wanting some of this Microsoft technology, small iterative improvements remind me of the inexorable lock-in ahead.

Ray Ozzie is right when he says they’re milling the code. Scott Guthrie stood out almost five years ago in an off-the-record retreat led by Eric Rudder where he rolled out the ASP.Net code. Today he, not Ray, recalled Bill’s mastery of the strategy at as many levels deep as we wanted to check. The old Microsoft is back, but now the question Ray and his team has to answer is what is the metric for success.

Google’s strength is as much a reminder of how not to get sucked back into the panacea of the “rich” internet experience as anything else. Until today, I hadn’t seen anything close to the old feeling Microsoft engendered: the willingness to do what it took to establish a fair price for dominance. Google now has that role, with its simple metric of user time, and I for one will not surrender it lightly. Instead, I will look for the opening the Firefox team took in jujitsuing the IE platform, that Flash leveraged in kicking video into gear, that Apple is doing with Apple TV.

Again, Ballmer is dismissive of Apple’s small market share, not recognizing the palpable sense of fiduciary responsibility to stick with the Mac as a measure of safety against the tyranny of ubiquity. I’ve for so long been the guy on the other side of the question, dismissive of OpenOffice, of Zune, of even the BlackBerry in the face of iPhone. This is not about teams, or stars, or power; it’s about the experience of feeling light on the feet as an attribute of success. It’s the comforting knowledge of being wrong: about open source, about Jason Calacanis, about a host of things I still don’t want to admit but will. But it’s also about the calm fusion of building on those insights, the layering of one world view over the next with its subtle signposts.

Tonight on Heroes we watched an alternate reality not unlike the one we saw performed at Mix. I don’t mean to suggest there are good guys and bad guys here, the tipping point, blah blah blah. No, these people are all heroes; Ray with his nervous manner trying to sell us on the logic of the big plus sign while Scoble and Winer Twitter on nearby. The sync on the Mac slowed to a crawl and I had to reattach for the Q&A, a perfect reminder of the downlevel experience I have in store on the new Web. The Ustream feed was sound-dead, but I still got the drift, enough to hear Udell in the background so I could call him and plum the latency and yet indomitable spirit of my platform.

Yes, I’ll look forward to hearing what Brendan Eich thinks about this challenge, how Udell will keep his integrity and lend Microsoft some of it in the process, how everybody will get their game on as they — all of them — will rise to the occasion and bring these two Webs together.

In the opening panel at Rafat Ali and Staci Kramer’s EconSM, some flavor:

• Tariq Krim of NetVibes–advertising to an audience is being or about to be replaced by attention mining.
• Some guy named Jason who apparently fail