Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab

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 to be replaced with contributor model. I have talked with John Furrier of Pod Tech about contributing resources and services for the filming and editing of material that extends the conference content. Specifically, I call Ray Ozzie (via his comm director) and ask him to participate. If/when he says he can't do that date, I follow immediately with requesting some time in Redmond to film him about MS plans for optimization/attention etc. If he declines, I go public with the whole frontal assault on his financial analysts meeting.

Next, Jonathan Schwartz, or rather simultaneously. Same drill. Jonathan can you speak? Chances are no because of prior commitments, but Jonathan will do something with me instead. His comeback might be I don't know enough about this attention thing to comment. (That didn't stop him from doing so for the Release 1.0 thing, but Esther wanted it cut out due to lack of authority.) If he plays it that way, then I write him an explanation of it and publish it immediately on GestureLab. He will comply. Also, we ask him for streaming support for the conference as a contribution.

Next, Benioff. Halfway between Ozzie and Schwartz, his commentary is around the question of how services can manage the roach motel data question. Does he support the Recorder? Open pool? Why not, given his innovations in sharing a percentage of revenue with charities, offering free Salesforce accounts for non profits, etc. How does Salesforce stack up with MS optimization strategy? (Floodgates open.)

The fundamental strategy is that we DON'T want these guys to participate directly in the conference, but as leaders in the community who are being asked to be responsive to users in charge. We roll the clip, then ask the question? How are they aligned? Are they contributors or resistors? For every Ozzie we don't get, we document the degree of resistance to meeting the user halfway.

Important: we NEVER accuse anyone of failure to comply. Instead we ask how and when they will comply.

Cracking open the story lines: engaging Hollywood and the record business. Not by embarrassing or attacking the Cartel, but by peeling the layers of the emergent user in control of point to point content. As I told Furrier last night, tech is the new rock n roll. The big budget production is not the target, nor is user generated content. Everybody except the Gang make the mistake of voting at one end or the other of this continuum. In fact, PROFESSIONALLY rendered user-controlled content is the sweet spot. It's not amateur hour, it's applying low-barrier technology and rapid development methodology to the real competition: soap operas. It's about marrying small HD cameras and GarageBand production models with real enterprise business stories that have enormous implications, and having the actual players represented in the course of operations. If we can't get Ozzie to come out of his bunker, we use the existing footage to tell the story he would have said to us, and interleave it with analysis, bravado from competitors, humor, and the coup de grace, the user in charge overlay. Remember we say to Ray: we're not asking your permission. Users can opt in entirely under their own power. We're funding this effort by delivering return on investment (datapoints) to users and incenting them away from silos and towards the pool. All things being equal, which is better: free, or the user getting paid? So much for Google, btw.

I need to come out of the box no later than tomorrow morning with this campaign. In fact, I should start tonight, flush with Apple's announcements. Leopard's iChat enhancements promise a production studio in every Mac by next spring that allows executive information conferencing in real time, rolling in video and Keynotes, with bundled recording of these video streams. This means that the platform for tech as rock n roll ships in 6 months, which means we use the Conference to release the first product of this new era, by getting contributors to pony up the existing resources to do this now and lock up the market when ANY user can do it in the spring.

Once we understand the dimensions of this operation (now), we can go back and look at what the content for the conference is: how does rich media play today in the attention and gesture experience? What is the value to AttentionSoft of commandeering the media experience of the rock n roll soap opera model, moving from podcast through video (10 minute audio and video promo bursts rolls up tech news by marrying analysis with real time metrics.) Endgadget, in the person of two guys, one writing, one shooting stills, achieved 7 million page views in 90 minutes today at Jobs' keynote. Mainstreamers think that means page views are not dead. We understand page views are commoditized. Given twenty guys with the same setup (approx. zero dollars above normal investment of Mac, camera, and brains) the differentiation is in the analysis. User in control but PROFESSIONAL output. It's a gesture cluster fuck, and guess who wins… the guys who feed the commodity streams into the console and control the political analysis based on the commodity news streams.

So who speaks at the conference? Calaconis properly vetted via requirement of contribution commitment. We ask Esther and Tim and hope they decline, then ask them for interviews to represent their perspectives. How the fuck does Tim dare decline that, based on the refusal going public embedded in a list of untouchables who are trying to preserve their gatekeeper roles. Battelle pinged within twenty minutes of returning from vacation.

Costollo, the VCs — how do they play in this world. Just as Sanborn pointed out that the new Dylan book is a Dale Carnegie BUSINESS book, this conference is a stone cold lay it out for users benefit toolkit for leveraging their barrierless content for professional advantage. Memetracker panel? Hell no. The new publisher in the Attention/Gesture economy. Hell yes. Rafat Ali, TechCrunch, Ray Lane, Benioff on a panel. Or clips flown in from those who can't be there, or iSIght interviews followed by live conversation. Attention is the operating system; the conference sessions are the apps. This ain't no stinkin unconference– the audience are chosen for the depth and breadth of their insight, and the output of the conference is what sponsors bid on standing alongside.

This is a blueprint for what we should call the Attention Convention. It is meant to create a skeleton on which we hang all contacts, media requests, contributor requests, etc. In this context, we can allocate time and resources (Ozzie trip because it cracks open the AOL bullshit by comparing MS to AOL, not our grassroots thing) efficiently and rapidly over the next 30 days. Actually we have a week in public time starting now.

Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 at 11:51 pm.
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