Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab

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 step we'll be taking on Wednesday at an AttentionTrust event in San Francisco, these datapoints (cough) reinforce the moves we are about to make.

As I announced briefly on the September 22nd edition of The Gillmor Gang, I have returned to AttentionTrust.org, the non-profit I co founded with Seth Goldstein, as board director and President. I resigned some months ago in the wake of Omidyar Network's funding of the Trust, and set about creating GestureBank and its open pool of anonymous attention data. Now, with GestureBank architecture in place and growing public awareness of the power of the open pool under user control, it's time for action.

From the first moment Dave Sifry and I created the fundamentals of Attention.xml — who, what, and for how long — a variety of individuals, startups, and observers have attempted to understand, capture, hitchhike alongside, and redirect the notion that what we do is ours to control. Over and over, the question: How can we convince ____ to give us back our data? That question is fundamentally irrelevant. It is a copy of our data at best that they hold, at their peril.

Better and more precise minds than mine have understood the value of attention long before I stumbled into it. Michael Goldhaber first wrote about it for Esther Dyson. John Battelle connected his Database of Intentions to search dynamics much the way that Brian Epstein connected the dots when the Beatles' recording with Tony Sheridan signalled the coming wave that overflowed out of Hamburg and the Cavern basement, and turned it into Beatlemania.

But what Sifry and I fashioned was simple enough not to be argued on its merits. Instead, FUD was brewed around the people: oh, this is a proprietary specification because Technorati is behind it. Oh, Gillmor is a journalist so he doesn't know what he's doing, or, as Mitch Kapor said when I interviewed him for the Release 1.0 report on Attention, that this was all so much hand waving. Perhaps it was, perhaps it still is, but every day the number of wavers grows and the doubts evaporate. It's been a learning experience for me too; I'm not unconfident about my instincts, but it's taken collaboration with people such as Seth Goldstein and Robert Anderson and Doc Searls and Dan Farber and, you know the list, to realize that perhaps my commitment to the music of the idea has served to propel it forward much more efficiently than the usual suspects' standards bodies and market land grabs and community flag waving can engender.

Time and again, my peers remind me of what it is that we've been doing here. When AOL's data leak broke out, Trust board director Mary Hodder wrote a stunningly precise and powerful analysis of the situation that led to a description of the value of the GestureBank open pool that not only had I never discussed with her but was only just coming to the realization that this is why I had risked alienating Goldstein, Hank Barry, and the rest of the Trust by apparently bailing on them to follow a poorly defined muse.

But over and over again, these people, and the folks who populate the Gang, and the listeners and readers who put up with my pathetic personal meanderings and Rodney-esque complaints, remind me in the subtlest and yes, most obnoxious ways how important this journey we're on remains. The continued criticism about how I produce the Gang serves as much to punctuate how valuable the conversation is as it does to annoy me. And when, as Jason Calaconis does on this week's edition, he tells us that he would show up even if the show wasn't being recorded, he shows what the stakes here really are.

Predicting the future is made easier by imagining what will happen, and more importantly, what won't. Try as I might, I can't see gestures as anything but the most efficient product of the near future. Every existing model inevitably crumbles alongside our innate ability to detect bullshit, irrelevance, and the possibility of a better life for us and our beloveds. It's Darwinian in force: let's see, if I'm going to dead Thursday, I better eat that burger today. Even better, as Professor Corey states (loosely) borrow the money so you won't ever have to pay for it. Or in Wimpyspeak, "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

Or, in attentionspeak, I'll gladly tell you today what I want instead of sifting through reams of crap that you randomly hurl at millions of apparent me's looking for a bite. It's not, "Tell me what you know," it's "Tell me you don't know anything so I can move on to the next idiot." I bet you're thinking I'm the idiot for telling you you don't know anything, but I'm talking about last night's audience. Do we know why that's funny when Letterman (Carson) says that? Because he's telling that joke to the same audience as last night's; he's taping two shows in a row so he can get away early for the weekend.

So if you laugh at that joke, you're laughing at yourself, and that means you're in on the joke. SO I guess we're not such amateurs now are we. Gestures are about the transition from

• We are the audience… to
• We are the producer (user-generated media)… to
• We are what we eat (gesture-incented media)

Again, imagine the possible futures: Do we subscribe to a magazine/site/feed about gossip written by

• gossip columnists
• our neighbors, or
• the celebrities themselves?

My guess: The magazine that delivers all three, the gossip columnist who becomes the celebrity (Murray the K), the neighbor who dishes the dirt funny (comedians), and the celebrity themselves (Jason Calaconis.) Look deeper, and all these are gesturers, bubbling up as an affinity group with a micro-community's innate power of self-selection and efficiency. The most efficient product wins. Now try and imagine a competitor. If you can, then go get some VC money quick, or borrow it from an old relative.

In the Gesture Economy, we're taking no prisoners, because we don't get out of this alive. But our dreams do, and god willing, our children.

Monday, October 2nd, 2006 at 5:07 pm.
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