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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 failed to buy MySpace–The future of media is not about telling but creating a platform for users to tell.
Richard Rosenblatt, who […]

Harriet is Mark Cuban. Mark (stood next to him but never talked to him) is out with his latest swipe at Web 2.0, that HDTV is where the action is. Harriet thinks Apple TV is a day late and a dollar short.
I am one of the people Mark says is eyeing HDTV. I’m looking because […]

I just wrote the most fantastic post in the press room at Web 2.0 Expo, and then lost it when Wordpress declined to auto-save. Yes, I know, Web 2.0 sucks, Office is not dead, blah blah blah. No matter, being brilliant is not part of my new business model. Instead, I’m all about the Law […]

InfoWorld timeline from the last print edition.

Back from drinks with Jason. I’m staying in a hotel overlooking 405, the traffic light at 60 mph in both directions. LA is somehow feeling more like the 70’s now than in decades. I hated the 70’s at the time; a rough mix of post-Beatle depression and chalky outlines around the body that was the […]

I’m in San Diego at the O’Reilly Etech conference, in the Executive Briefing track. Seth Goldstein is about to demo his latest attention project, AttenTV. Out on the Net, the shuttering of InfoWorld leads TechMeme. Thanks to Matt McAlister for calling out my role in the late stages of that book’s evolution. As Dave Winer […]

Mike Arrington, Tim Bray, and Jonathan Schwartz made for an interesting menage at Sun yesterday evening. As usual I wasn’t invited, but Scoble was otherwise occupied and forwarded me the invite. To be fair, Sun doesn’t know what to make of me. When I was in a position to get their attention as back page […]

Just got off the phone and video with Loren Feldman, who is approaching a complete system crash mentally. I have been eagerly anticipating this, not wanting to accelerate the thing for fear of creating a dangerous life-threatening condition, but at the same time hoping that the continuing meltdown of the flogosphere would reach an epic […]

I’m in New York at the Open Data conference, hosted by AttentionTrust and Reuters. As if by some unseen uber-twitter, Ross Mayfield and Stowe Boyd have popped up recently with tomes on attention or the lack of it. ReadWrite Web also weighed in. The world shuddered briefly, wobbled on its axis, and rebooted. Hardly noticed […]

The GestureBank is a collection of individual Internet user activity that has been stripped of all personal identification and aggregated into a central pool of anonymous behavior, all under the control of the users. This pool of electronic gestures represents a new kind of media experience, created, owned and controlled explicitly by the users who […]

All set for the Academy Awards tonight and I get this Gmail package from an anonymous Hollywood friend. Seems some folks like Harrison Ford and Sandra Bullock thought it was about time to thank all the little people for all the real work that gets done making movies. But you won’t see it tonight on […]

There’s a moment on this John Lennon Starbucks compilation Remember where the studio chatter after a breakdown reveals this phrase — wry, tabloid theatrical, perfect. Ringo cops to it, and Lennon gracefully refocuses. Another moment a decade later, Just Starting Over, and a middle eight that McCartney must surely have recognized as equal to the […]

Jonathan Schwartz has a problem. Me. I read his blog today, starting with the most recent post and eventually landing on one a few days ago about the resurgence of the thick client. Let me weigh in thusly : what a load of shit this is. When Sun leadership starts moving away from the Google […]

The Gillmor Gang — Mike Vizard, Jason Calacanis, Dan Farber, Doc Searls, Robert Anderson, Dana Gardner, and Sam Whitmore — give thanks and look forward to what comes next. Recorded Wednesday November 22, 2006.

Apparently there’s a bootleg copy of this Friday’s Gillmor Gang circulating the Net, or so suggests Jason Calacanis. Since anyone who’s been a guest on the show could have dialed in, who knows who the culprit might be. My bet is Jonathan Schwartz. I’ll have the complete show up over the weekend.

Thoughts:
I resubscribed to The Gillmor Gang because I managed to burn through Leo Laporte’s “This Week in Tech”. Could someone smack me the next time I do this? From listening to Steve go on and on and on about Earthlink and GoDaddy during the first few minutes of EVERY F-ING PODCAST to listening to the […]

I’m in Washington for a workshop on attention and gestures. In the cab on the way to the hotel I called in to the Gillmor Gang recording, as did Mike Arrington, Jason Calacanis, Robert Anderson, Hugh MacLeod, Dan Farber, and Doc Searls. There’s a lot of nice moments in between the cell phone noise and […]

Some listeners are reporting a problem with Part I of the Harpo Gang series. I have just deleted it from the Podshow site and am reuploading it. It should then repropagate to iTunes. If not, I’ve sent word to Podshow about the issue.

We recorded the Gillmor Gang this morning, with Calacanis, Arrington, Farber, Searls, Gardner, and Anderson present and accounted for. What with the usual bifurcation between enterprise (MS/Novell) and Web 2 oh (Arrington/Calacanis), I should have spent more time trying to stitch things together than I did. But I made the decision early to lay out […]

One of the advantages of being so far behind the blogostream is that I get to read Nick Carr after we’ve done a show on his target, in this case Microsoft a year after Ray Ozzie’s famous memo. On this week’s Gillmor Gang, we go slow and deep on the same issues Nick refactors, particularly […]

Those of you waiting for this week’s Gillmor Gang should look for the episodes to start streaming tomorrow morning some time. I received a nice note from Doc Searls explaining his absence, but nothing from Mike Arrington, who apparently is on vacation beyond email for the next week. I saw Yahoo’s Chad Dickerson tonight at […]

this is another test of the google docs to wordpress

Late last night Marshall Kirkpatrick of Techcrunch IMed me about a Flickr patent application that appears to attempt to privatize attention data, their “special sauce” they call lookingforness. Thomas Hawk, who I’ve come to know recently for his gentlemanly intelligence and skill as a digital photographer, posted on the subject in the context of his […]

I've set up Google Docs to post via the metaweblog api to GestureLab. Unfortunately, the post does not appear, except under Scheduled Entries, where it announces it will appear in 7 hours. Any ideas why? Oddly, the Post timestamp in both this and the errant post are correct, i.e. within 20 minutes of each other. […]

A few nights ago I wrote a quick post on the death of TV. It attracted quite a bit of attention, not Scoble attention, mind you, but quite a bit for something Dave Winer didn't point at. I love the mechanics of this quasi-page view game: lots of well-reasoned arguments with the central thesis, a […]

YouTube, Digg, and MySpace took out TV a few months back, and now the corpse is sitting up and taking notice. Latest evidence is the incipient obliteration of Studio 60, the West Wing sequel which is terrific and therefore doomed, in favor of 30 Rock, which is not and therefore not. At least we don't […]

from Jonathan Schwartz' blogroll.

Nick Carr gets perilously close to jumping his own shark when he asks when does free get predatory. I knew he could go there some months ago when he listed Google as merely a disruptor of "real" platformers such as Microsoft and Apple. Perhaps Nick has a bit of an Innovator's Chasm he's having difficulty […]

I was talking to Jeff Clavier last night. He was just dropping in to say hi to his friend Ismael Ghalimi, the brains behind the Office 2.0 conference. What struck me was Jeff's story of how Ismael went from a standing start to a full-blown conference in a year. The event thus represents his deep […]

Thanks to Dan Farber's intersession, I received a pass to the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. With Ray Lane's words still ringing from the Salesforce media lunch on Monday (lots of dead men walking), I arrived too late to catch Dan's conversation with Esther Dyson but did hear Andrew McAfee deliver a well-researched […]

and gets reamed for his trouble. But he gets a good post out of it, and that's something. Something really good, in fact. Because most of this new Blogosphere 2.0 is just crap. Well designed, timely, Seth Godinesque, crapola. Even, or especially, this post.
Arrington is at his best when he puts one sentence in front […]

Doc tells newspapers to open their archives (good idea) and link into everything (not a good idea.) Post-dating links makes sense in the vanilla world of perfect page rank, click integrity, and other fantasy worlds I would call Third Life, the one after the one I haven't got time for.
Dan and David toss the Attention […]

Gesturemania is showing sure signs of breaking out. The last few days have brought a flurry of attention (cough) about an attention specification, Kim Cameron's gesture grokking as channeled by Doc Searls, and the entrance of Google Reader into the RSS attention commons. Immersed as I've been with Robert Anderson in preparing GestureBank for the […]

The thought that podcasting needs a name change is right up there with the idea that Adam Curry put forward that breaking Gillmor Gang up into pieces was holding it hostage. In the rush to formalize the "best practices" of rebooted media, it is laughable that any of us have even the remotest clue about […]

When Dave Winer says the hard part is getting enough adoption to achieve a critical mass, you should listen. If anything has achieved a critical mass, it's RSS. When Doc Searls talks about Vendor Management Systems, or intentions, or whatever, you should listen. If anything has achieved a critical mass, it's the Cluetrainism that markets […]

Google has just pushed a revamp of Google Reader that I will quickly move over to from Rojo. Here's hoping Rojo frees my gesture data from its store. Look for Niall Kennedy's analysis; he and I were briefed on this a few weeks ago, among others I'm sure. And stay tuned for important news from […]

Even for me, the amount of silence I've been generating recently is a bit much. Between the things I can't, shouldn't, or won't talk about, there's not a lot left. I'm hoping to break the logjam over the next few days. The best place for now is The Gillmor Gang, where recent appearances by Jason […]

Mike Arrington stood me up for a Yahoo! Hack Day rub-a-dub. Dana Gardner was on the road at an analyst meeting. Jason, Hugh, Dan, Doc (40 minutes in) and Mike Vizard showed, along with guest Gabe Rivera, who actually spilled some real news. Scoopsters should call hm up and beat me to the punch. I […]

Attention politics require a willingness to get down in the mud and slop around with the bottom feeders. The bad news is that, that the quality of the lifestyle sucks. The good news is that the good actors shine brightly, are easily identifiable, and have almost no barrier to cooperation. Just walk up and start […]

It's looking like the full Gang is in the offing for tomorrow's session. That is, minus Udell, who is busy getting ready for a barnstorm of his Dylanesque never-ending tour of Mexico and several other outposts. But Calacanis says he'll show, and his You Tube post suggests he's re-engaging somewhat. The YouTube myth gets a […]

Richard Koman of Tom Foremski's Silicon Valley Watcher quotes the Mercury News on HPGate:
The California Attorney General's office officially launched an investigation into the matter, issuing subpoenas, the Mercury News reports.
`I have no settled view as to whether or not the chairwoman's acts were illegal, but I do think they were colossally stupid,'' Attorney […]

Just a note to let you know I'm thinking of you. Recording a Gillmor Daily this afternoon with Dan Farber, and then getting to editing the Gang session we recorded on Tuesday. Doc has a Suitwatch coming up that points at it, so I've promised him it will be largely available tomorrow.
Later today I pick […]

Some chickens may start coming home to roost now that Google is going semi-public with their Office strategy. For starters, can we now agree to stop listening to denials from Eric Schmidt and others about this? Doubt it.
Next, can we start watching more carefully who insists the Google Office strategy doesn't exist? Doubt it. Seems […]

Just finished recording the Last Gillmor Gang. Of course, for those who pay attention, I'm calling every show from now on the Last one, under the assumption that one of these days I'll be right. It's another good one, which I'll start mixing in a few hours, and it will spool out in at least […]

Something stinks about the AOL firing of its CTO. On its face, it's a simple deal: you snooze you lose. A subordinate screws up, you're both gone. But my gut tells me that AOL is perpetuating the damage, by expressing their inability to process this event in any but a binary you're-gone knee jerk. The […]

A strange toboggan ride this week. Strapped in to the cockpit was the resolute Nick Carr, ready to do battle once more against the arrayed gigolos of blogdom. Like a Commodore Perry wiping the grit from his goggles, Our Nick lay ready in wait for the nincompoops of the net.
It wasn't always like this, you […]

The stream of information into my inforouter has reached an unmanagable level of overflow. This is bad news, forcing me into TechMeme, Scripting News, Valleywag, and Between the Lines as a triage strategy to become acceptably uninformed. However, this is good news, because the collapse of the inforouter paves the way for application strategies under […]

Digg sucks because it uses the page view model as its engine. The headlines are designed to attract: something about lossless iTunes audio pulls me in but then the payoff is that hard drive size will encourage larger hard drives. How about a headline that discourages clicking: iTunes lossless audio coming; not soon enough. Then: […]

Today's recording of the Gillmor Gang produced some mixed feelings. On the one hand, it was nice to hear from Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis, or as someone put it Calacarrington, light-sabering with each other. I'm grateful for their interest in being on the show, though Jason's bailout at the hour mark to do an […]

First, Seth and I need to lock down on my strategy to turn the conference into a political convention. Not an unconference, not an ETech or a PC Forum, but a new hybrid television show/interactive alliance matrix that informs the community of their fundamental choice: line up with AOS or risk gestribution.
So, sponsorships model needs […]

As Scott Trotter points out in a comment, my InfoRouter feed has been redirected to this GestureLab feed. I've sent email to Nick Bradbury with Scott's report about FeedDemon. It's updated as well in Rojo, but interestingly it continues to list the old info about the feed:
Steve Gillmor's InfoRouter
Your data, your attention
[…]

He's the Golden Boy of the Valley, and everyone wants to come to his party (I'm number one on the list.) So what is he doing this dog day of August? Doing tech support for the Washington Post. Hopefully he'll post something about all these mainstreamers calling him up and asking for an explanation about […]

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Dell […]

Last night at the WordCamp party I was told by several people that I could switch the blog display from excerpting to full text. I think they were talking about the RSS feed, which is already doing that. I hope they are right in saying there is a way to change the blog presentation, or […]

Just got off the phone with Doc Searls, who was farting out the door in the hallway in Cambridge. Doc asserts that while rarely does a day pass without hearing men farting, women fart only very occasionally and auspiciously, at least audibly. Now back to our movie, "Citizen Kane" starring Jason Calaconis.

I'm having a surprising amount of fun writing this blog given that no one is reading it. It's like the pleasure I get being told by Fred Wilson, who I admire tremendously, that my no link theory is crap. He's basing this on a response to Robert Scoble's account of a conversation he had […]

It used to be (Thursday) that if you had a great conversation with Scoble and all things were revealed and understood, that if, on the way home, he ran into somebody who captivated him with some detail about Second Life or other, he'd post about that. Last in, first out.
Well, not sure what happened or […]

Here I am at Syndicate.