Navelgrazing
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 Gang (Dan's coin) around and suggest that the key is big player adoption and aligning Identiy and Attention Gangs. OK, fellows, I get it. Over 3 billion served. Quantity is the goal. Traction is a metric best realized by market force meeting a good story.
Dan does point out that our tilting at windmills is the stuff of revolutions. Have I made clear what the verdict is? Good.
What is happening in Gestureville is the pooling of clicks, lack of clicks, trqansparent gestures, opaque gestures, black hole discovery, and so on. Denise Howell does a good job of channeling what, if not why or why we care, I said. Between Doc, Dan, David, and Denise, I am triangulating what is really going on here. Suddenly I'm elated, in a bizarre goony hostile sort of way.
Let me try to explain (for myself as much as anybody.) This moment is not about turning the corner, inverting the network, putting users back (or newly) in charge. We are in charge, have been all along. The various tools and services we employ to enrich our brains produce varying degrees of efficiency. While we do this, we emit gestures that contain high-value signals of our interest, instincts about future interest, intent, opinion, and other filter drivers.
As I've been bouncing arounf Google Reader, from river of news to email hunt and click to vanity trolling, andso on, I'm generating powerful streams of gestures that can be recorded and mined as signatures — a macro language of the quality of efficiency. In additional words, the signature channel has its own unique value, above and beyond the "success" or lack of it. For a few hours, I've been semi-consciously moving through different patterns and noting (only parenthetically as observation here in this post) what propells me to make a change from one mode to another.
As I do this, ideas surface around interface design, not how to do things well, but how to allow repetition, returning to posts, recording not just read/unread but read/unread/read, keyboard patterns, irritation in navigation, what a good post feels like in observing how it is consumed, and so on. If you think I'm talking about complicated, low investment return rocket science, I'm really not. I'm just stuttering on the notion that the signatures of gestures are perhaps as or more valuable than the actual data. Meta meta data I guess.
Writing like this, as a methodology fro coaxing out value from a brain ODed on pragmatics, is enjoyable. I will be inerested to see how or if it resonates beyond just me.
October 6th, 2006 at 1:48 pm
[…] Steve Gillmor and meta-meta-data. It reminds me of the recent report on Powerset, a new search engine that uses natural speech. […]