Steve Gillmor's InfoRouter

They spent a whole year telling me that the Web was broken.

Jon Udell

It wasn't me telling you that.

Robert Scoble

– from the new Gillmor Gang, now "live" on Podshow.

As president of the Attention Trust, here's our initial response to Robert Scoble's post regarding Google's patent applications:

It is great that Google is making productive use of attention data.  We invite them (and everyone) to join AttentionTrust and work together to understand attention in an open, transparent way.  This will maximize trust, and thereby improve search for everyone.

FYI Robert will join the Gillmor Gang, recording tomorrow at 11 Pacific, to discuss this week's events. The podshow should be available early evening, even for Dave Winer, who thinks the show is slipping and, unlike Google, still doesn't care about attention. Until then, you can download today's AttentionTech with Patrick Grady of Rearden Commerce.

As Mike Vizard calls it at the end of today's AttentionTech with Barb Darrow, whether it's Office Live or Office Dead is for the jury, I mean the audience, to decide. That's because the reboot here is about the users being in charge. For me, the interesting things about yesterday's media announcement were what wasn't said. Windows Live, once the bandwidth was restored, was slick, fast, and convincing. Office Live was negotiated, tentative, and political to the extreme. Not good news for those of us who see another Last War ground war looming.

As Darrow notes, Office's Steve Sinofsky is the general noted for bringing Office in on time, regardless of which new or down level OS it needs to run on. But here the Waterloo for Office will be conducted on a much leveler playing field than Microsoft is used to dealing with. By the time small shops mature to the point where they can be upsold to the subscription tier, the trenches will be littered with the bodies of VARs and gadget vendors who make the mistake of not building cross-platform gadgets.

That means cross-cloud attention recorders, so that we (users in control) can maximize our return on the investments Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, and Google are making in our attention. If the cartel (using the RIAA/MPAA metaphor) is unwilling to make transfer of attention metadata legal both in and out of their clouds, then those who will will exact a greater and greater tax on their proprietary and less trusted streams of gestures. As the network moves toward enhanced fidelity of gestures with its increased ROI and self-selecting lead generation, the others will follow.

That of course is why Robert Scoble is encouraging his company to jump before they're pushed. That is wise advice from the Bunny, who has carved out a trust algorithm that Microsoft should examine carefully. After yesterday's Q&A, Ray Ozzie came over and demonstrated quickly how well he's listening to this debate. Respnding to the inevitable and man-bites-dog spin that this is Hailstorm II (yes it is, and here's why) Ray noted that this is oh so 2005 and Google has been leading the charge to indemnify Hailstorm with Gmail and every other trinket they've thrown at us.

This makes the mincing tiptoing of Office Dead seem tragically underwhelming. It reminds me of two friends–brothers–in the Sixties who signed a deal with Columbia Records. Brother B, the Dennis Wilson of the group (meaning good looking, athletic, makes it look easy Willie Mays type) had a terrific song that he refused to put on the first record. He was saving it for the thrid record. The deal was cancelled after the second one bombed.

In this new war, the Attention War, keeping quiet is only a good move when it says more than talking it up. Google was all over yesterday's launch, from the Windows Live email clone which lacked the very rebooted seek-and-ye-shall-find model that drove folders into the dustbin of history. Sure, for Microsoft it makes sense to go with the one that brung you and extend the file system to the Net. That in fact was the only strategic move against Google made the entire interminable 3 hours. GoogleBase by comparison seems like a service about the file system, not the system itself. I'll stick with Gmail and switch for storage.

But it wasn't clear just what part of storage Microsoft is willing to give away, as Dave Winer so astutely pointed out to the first meeting of the (Gillmor) Identity Gang on New Year's Eve. "Everybody has to give something up to make this work," he said, and it may hold true here in this strange brew we're mixing. If Ozzie doesn't give storage away, well, then it will have to be a calendar. I've already got mail, no matter how cute Live Mail looks. But Office Dead gives coupons to calendaring, in the form of a subscription upsell. The fundamental problem is that Google/Yahoo/Skype can lose less by making an offer we won't refuse.

Sun and Jonathan Schwartz spoke the loudest in the silence yesterday. Jonathan may not have invented the idea of driving out competition by reducing their profit to zero (Microsoft did with Internet Explorer and Option Pack 4) but he was the first to prove it could work against Microsoft with Java Desktop and Linux in emerging Asia. When Steve Balmer reopened the door to Office negotiations in Malaysia, the can of worms spilled all the way to yesterday's coup. For that is what it was, as the new guard inside Microsoft, led by the first guy to beat Microsoft in the application space post-Office, figured out how to pin a price on the tail of the Office group. It's all downhill from here for Raikes. Now we get to see how quick Ozzie can grab at the opportunities so dearly won.

Jeff Clavier of Software Only joins AttentionTech for Part I of a discussion about innovation, faux attention, and rebooting the Valley.

Part II is up now too. 

When Robert Scoble reported on our late night conversation after the Berkeley meat-up Monday night, I briefly panicked when I realized he had really gotten what I've been talking about with regards to attention. Then I calmed down, figuring he'd forget it all after a good night's sleep.

Wrong. Tonight, the Bunny pops up in Rojo with a gesture and gadget-laden post that clearly indicates attention has gotten his. Luckily his site appears to be down, refusing redirection and connections, so I'll check back in the morning before heading off to breakfast with Dave (who thinks Gillmor Gang is "slipping" and doesn't care about attention.)

Could it be that Microsoft is paying attention? On Tuesday, Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie will likely shake up the industry with details of their rapid move toward the attention economy. The key to this reboot is the understanding that page rank, and the fundamental search methodology of people looking for information, is about to be flipped on its head to a new model where the information is provided gestures of intention that allow it to target the user. The key is the same fundamental that drives RSS: the invitation on the part of the user to address information inward.

As splogs destroy the perception of page rank legitimacy, which is based not on the actual metrics of linking but the accrued reputational value of a site's authority, the number of false positives will undermine confidence and dilute the economics of the system. It's not so much that links are dead, Doc, as that trust in link rank is undermined. As in the bond market, weakened trust lowers ratings and shifts the market in other directions. This is Microsoft's opportunity.

Interestingly, Microsoft is already sending signals–gestures in attention-speak–that it gets this. As Dan Farber reported and Information Week confirmed, Redmond is undergoing a massive transformation as the political effects of Jim Allchin's retirement sweep over the company. The once-unthinkable knowledge that Office revenue could literally go to zero has been unburdened from its apocalyptic moorings as Ozzie and Gates realize they are being handed the optimal opening to embrace Web 2.0 and pivot into the new attention economy.

Ozzie makes much of the notion that services will work for consumers and the SMB market but not the enterprise. I don't agree, but let's follow that logic anyway. Office's vulnerability, as expressed in Gmail's impending route of Exchange/Notes at the consumer and virtual enterprise level, creates an ironic but seductive opportunity. Take Ozzie's assumptions about Office's lock on the corporate market and flip it on its head: Microsoft can afford to challenge Google, Yahoo, and Skype with thin pluggable apps–what Scoble calls gadgets–that can slip onto the desktop alongside Gtalk, Gmail, Skype, and RSS inforouters like Rojo or Memeoradum.

When Gtalk came out, I quickly added it to my mix of GooOffice components. It interoperates quite nicely with Skype on my Tablet. Ironically, this loosens Google's grip by establishing multiple sources of attention metadata that are not being captured by one company but many. Not only does that produce value for users who support independent attention recorders such as the one we've seeded with AttentionTrust, but it also creates the foundationfor a cross-vendor API based on attention metadata. Gestures that span multiple engines and transports (AIM, GTalk, Skype IM, and Yahoo; Bloglines, Rojo, MyYahoo, Google Reader, Vista; the coming round of calendar gadgets; etc.) will inherently become more trustworthy as signals of interest than gamed links, walled garden cross and up-sells, and attempts at supplying authoritative information from incumbent publishers who can't or won't intermingle content from their competitors.

 Back to Microsoft: the enterprise holds firm as Redmond ships a thin pluggable calendar app for both IE and Firefox. Not only does it run across Linux, Solaris, the Mac, and Windows, but it communicates back to Office as an offline store. But Microsoft can't fake this: if it supports an attention recorder across all components–Gmail, Gtalk, Yahoo's mail client, RSS read unread marks, offline sync–then users can leverage the aggregated metadata to wrest the best value out of all players in return for access to the aggregated data. It will not coincidentally uphold the four foundational principles of the AttentionTrust–the rights to own, market, move, and track the flow of their gestures around the network.

Meanwhile, if Ray is right, Office remains stable in the enterprise. If he's wrong, and like Office 97, attention economics rapidly proliferate between organizations and along the virtual supply chain, forcing their way past IT and through outsourced on-demand Office dialtone services, then Microsoft has a huge headstart in easing the transition from local to virtual storage. Like Office 97, build the new Office at home, on the road, in hoteling desks in satellite offices, then let the users drive it past IT into the office with automated replication that synchronizes both data and services into the installed Office container.

Remember: Office's potential demise kept Microsoft from moving directly to confront the Google challenge. In the same way, Microsoft's embrace of attention forces Google to cannabilize Adsense and their black box economic engine to stay competitive, something as expensive to their core revenue model as Office is to Microsoft. It's a massive game of chicken, and I think Ozzie and Gates will signal on Tuesday that they've already discounted the loss of future Office revenue and therefore have much less to lose by jumping now.

But none of this will happen, because Scoble forgot everything I told him. Oh, shoot, Scobleizer is back up. What have I done? Naah, nothing to worry about. They won't listen to Scoble. Oh yes they will.

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Tech columnist and blogger for the san jose mercury news dan gillmor used to be the African american magazines wigs afro With a forehead rubber bald

After 19 episodes, we've launched Podshow's AttentionTech podcast site and RSS feed with shows 20 and 21, synchronized with their release on Sirius Channel 103. Wednesday's show, #20, features co-host Mike Vizard and guest Dan Farber of ZDNet, who reports on Ray Ozzie's appearance at the Vortex conference, as well as analysis of Google's GoogleBase project. Today's episode is a deep dive into the world of multicore processors from Patrick Schmid, managing editor of the authoritative Tom's Hardware site. This weekend, I'll start adding previous shows until we get caught up.

Do Public Broadcasters Get It?

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Final version   10.18.05

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<description> Description </description>

During the doldrums of mid-August Steve Gillmor dropped a semi-cryptic post on his ZDNet blog to the effect that he'd been working with a group of people from public broadcasting as part of something called the Public Service Publisher Initiative (PSP) and had received a private email from one them that had prompted him to drop out of the group.

I'm the guy who wrote that email. I've been in public radio since the early 1970s and have produced a nationally syndicated ambient music program called Hearts of Space since 1983. From 1984 to 2001 we also operated an independent record label. I take a more than passing interest in new technologies that help me reach my audience and have been a new media activist in the public radio system since the early days of streaming. We currently run a paid streaming service based on our program archive and are developing a comprehensive Internet music service around our niche repertoire.

Steve went on to suggest that the issues raised in our private exchange be taken into the open so they can be hashed out between broadcasters and producers from the incumbent public service media and members of the tech and podcasting community. I readily agreed, and after some unrelated delays we further discussed the situation in a conference call in early September between Steve, me,  Dennis Haarsager of Northwest Public Radio and TV, and Rich Winefield and Tim Olson of San Francisco public station KQED. After more unrelated delays, here it is.

<item> What's the beef? </item>

The original issue that provoked this beef is not that important. I criticized a Gillmor Daily podcast Steve did with Doc Searls ("Broadband on the Run"); he reacted. Why should you care?  Because of the larger issues behind it, which I hope this will illuminate.

To slightly oversimplify the fairly intense discussion that followed, there were two issues. One had to do with quality, in particular the importance of production quality of podcasts compared to professionally produced media; the other with larger questions of the relationship between citizen-produced Internet media and professional, especially non-commercial, public service media. Steve was so frustrated by what he was hearing from me that he unleashed the ultimate early-adopter missile:  You guys just don't get it.

Respectfully to everyone involved, I think we get it just fine. I believe what we are really seeing is an understandable collision between values, which I try to explain here. You may disagree, in which case I hope you'll let me know. I'm doing my part to make it a public conversation.

<item> Back Story </item>

The events that led to Steve joining the PSP group and ultimately quitting it began at a conference in San Francisco in January 2005 produced by an organization called the IMA or Integrated Media Association. If netizens have never heard of it, that's because it was created by and functions entirely within the public radio and television community. It has an open website at http://www.integratedmedia.org.

IMA was chartered to represent the technically and conceptually progressive Internet wing of U.S. public media, and it played an important role in the gestation of the PSP Initiative. But from the moment the core of the activist PSP group hooked up with Steve at the IMA Conference, things started to develop in ways we had not forseen.

One the primary functions of the IMA is to build a case for a broad improvement in public radio/TV web services, while the PSP group was focused solely on Internet program distribution. IMA had to move more slowly than we felt necessary, and ultimately the PSP Group chose to operate on its own, outside of the IMA.  (The stations in the PSP remain IMA members.)  After a few months we discovered and quickly formed a working alliance with Mike Homer and his colleagues at the Open Media Network, who were over a year ahead of us in developing an online public media distribution service based on the Kontiki P2P engine.

I don't think you can fully appreciate the difference between the brutal techno-Darwinism-on-crystal-meth reality of the Internet space and the slow, polite, idealistic, chronically underfunded world of U.S. public broadcasting unless you've worked in both environments — the difference is just too great. If you work in IT, the fact that you may support a local public broadcaster and listen to All Things Considered or Morning Edition or <yourFavoriteShow> will just confuse you.

Steve apparently put in some time at non-commercial WBAI-FM in New York in the 1970s, and I think that Doc Searls and Doug Kaye each have some experience in commercial broadcasting. All of them have abundant published perspectives on the issues of broadcasting and podcasting. From my vantage point, these are effectively two different worlds, with a potential wormhole connecting them along technical and idealistic/value lines that intersect somewhere in the middle of the Long Tail. Understanding that is what the rest of this piece is about.

Steve was far more aware of this potential connection than any of us from public broadcasting when we met. RSS had barely made a beachhead among public broadcasters and only a handful of the most technically astute public broadcast webmasters were aware of podcasting, even fewer of its disruptive potential.

Steve administered aggressive doses of "tough love" in the first few months of meeting with us and forced everyone to get up to speed on the big changes implicated by RSS, podcasting and citizen media, tagging, search, Web 2.0 applications and other trends from the leading edge of Internet evolution. At the time (early 2005) there were only a few scattered experiments with podcasting from the larger public stations, despite the fact that they were sitting on sizeable unused archives of legally downloadable material and ongoing series.

This was slightly surprising because public broadcasters had been much quicker to adopt streaming than commercial broadcasters. And public broadcasters had built their business on the niche content, small audiences and donation business models that mark the first generation of podcasting. A startup called Public Interactive was created in 1999 by a group of the largest public radio stations and one of the national program distributors to provide Internet services to station web sites. Part of their service was hosting continuous streams as extensions of station air signals. By 2005, all but the smallest public stations were streaming their air channel, and the larger ones were offering some on-demand content on their web sites.

Streaming was seen by public broadcasters as radio by other means, a way to fill in gaps in local coverage, reach ex-patriate listeners, and perhaps get a few out-of-town subscriptions. Static, non-interactive streams were like radio without the limitations of  transmitters, while on-demand streaming offered a whole new level of service. And all of it was completely outside the regulatory domain of the FCC, which was almost too much freedom to handle for people who'd been looking over their shoulders every day for 50 years.

<item> Time + Quality = Service </item>

The core of the long tail theory is that the Internet finally makes serving niche audiences efficient and economically viable, especially when aggregated. I take it as axiomatic that all niche audiences have been chronically underserved in the past, and will be better served in the future by both participatory and professional digital sources online.

But these niche audiences do not exist in a vacuum. The same people are also members of mass and medium size audiences. Consciously or not, their reference standard for radio and television content has been created by years of exposure to high production value commercial media and high quality non-commercial broadcast media in series like Nova, Frontline and All Things Considered, as well as Ken Burns specials and other documentaries. With their BBC DNA, these programs define a working standard.

Steve Gillmor has argued that "truth," relevance, and perhaps creativity are the key values in podcasting, and that technical production quality doesn't matter in long tail media. I disagree.

It's an arguable point for users in the heady days of realizing you are finally being programmed to, but in the medium to long run I don't believe that even niche audiences will sit still for extended doses of amateurish, inconsistent, self-indugent programming, no matter how vertically compelling the subject matter. For niche programs to attract new audiences and hold them over time, they will have to bear at least reasonable comparison to the production standards of mainstream media.

This is particularly true for audio, which cannot easily be scanned and almost always takes 1:1 hard time to consume. (There's a new feature on the iPod that allows you to listen to Audiobooks at faster than normal speed, so perhaps 2:1 time compression for speech will be normal someday.)  Unfortunately for entry level podcasters and notwithstanding the existence of amazing cheap tools for the job, working with audio and learning how to create a consistently listenable program takes several years to master.

This is just my opinion. For a more objective comparison, consider independent music, where the technical enabling revolution in home studios and cheap publishing on cassette, CD and now online — has been going on for about 35 years. Today, production quality standards of indie music approach those of major label releases except for the most elaborate mainstream material. Once the 'shock of service' wears off for niche listeners, I believe it will apply to podcasters as well.

That doesn't mean that there isn't room for all kinds of innovative programming and more improvised, casual, creative, offbeat approaches to niche and public service content. Or that talk programmers, interviewers and documentarians can't develop more individual styles and voices.

But I think it implies that in the medium and long run, listeners will expect a dependable level of quality and consistency of video, sound, performance, information and entertainment value in their niche media. And if grassroots podcasting and webcasting are going to be monetized via subscription, PPV or advertising models as Podshow and others are proposing — then listeners, viewers and advertisers will all want a return on their time and money investments.

An organization called the INA or International Nanocasting Alliance, has been formed around precisely these issues, to draw a line between the casual/hobbyist and professional levels of long tail media. I think they have a point.

<item> Business models </item>

In the U.S., public service media pioneered the model of user supported broadcasting. It's still around, providing an average of over 40% of the funding of public radio and television. This model is now being rolled over to long tail web sites, blogs and vertical  services via tip jars, PayPal donations and other attempts to secure voluntary support from users. Doug Kaye has instituted this method on IT Conversations, along with the use of volunteer producers (another public radio tradition) to edit and prepare the small waterfall of material he's releasing each week. It's often compared to the open source software development system, but there are also significant differences. 

Public radio and television have over 50 years experience with this model. It was born of necessity at KPFA in Berkeley in the 1950s, and was ahead of its time in recognizing the kind of direct producer/audience interaction and shared sense of purpose that the Internet now delivers in spades. 

But it also has serious disadvantages: even after 40 years of increasingly organized, skillful appeals for voluntary support, only about 10% of the audience actually pays. How podcasters expect a model that has barely worked in the context of full time professional broadcasting by licensed local monopolies to work for even smaller audiences is beyond me. Only a small fraction of programs and services will ever be able to sustain themselves this way. And if they do, most of them will pay a significant price by having to operate on a subsistence economy.

I also reject the idea that incumbent public broadcasters are doomed by their overhead and infrastructure. I think Doug Kaye's post about On the Media and WGBH in Blogarithms misunderstands both the issue and the context. 

It's not about big staffs and deluxe studios; WGBH and the major incumbent producers are exceptions. They all have multiple sources of funding that have been developed over many years.  Their production facilities are largely paid for. They can, and are, adapting rapidly to new technologies. They can leverage their infrastructure and produce shows that meet their traditional standards of quality for sound, writing, production and on-air talent, while simultaneously spinning off new shows that take advantage of new distribution and promotion opportunities. As has been said of the (far more conservative) Catholic church — don't underestimate their ability to adapt.

But for the typical public radio station, voluntary support fails to provide a sustaining level of funding for their minimal staffs and physical plants, which results in a constant need for additional grant support, increasing amounts of soft advertising in the form of "expanded underwriting" spots (the commercializing of non-commerical broadcasting), and at its worst — the descending spiral of pandering to audiences exemplified by the endless lifestyle fundraising specials that have sucked much of the integrity and quality out of public television along with the dollars of its aging audience — a pathetic subversion of the original mission.

<item> Values </item>

Where the public service media incumbents and the leading edge of the podosphere can meet is on the level of values: truth, integrity, transparency, accuracy, relevance, compassion…add yours. 

I'm probably not the best person to articulate these values and standards on behalf of the public service media incumbents — but I will defend them. For various reasons, my 30 years in the public radio system have been spent mostly as a maverick and outsider. When I couldn't make a decent living in public radio as a syndicator, I started related businesses, a strategy that worked financially but further distanced me from the conservative public service purists who still dominate the network.

To get a fuller sense of the value system that underlies the incumbent public service media system, the best place to look is the BBC, which is largely responsible for defining them. BBC researcher Alan Blumlein invented stereo in the 1930's. In addition to audio technology, the company also established all the major genres and standards for program content.

A fascinating history and summation of the BBC experience was given in August 2005 by JOHN BIRT, former Director General of the BBC, in a speech at the Edinburgh International Conference. His account is all the more cogent and timely because he is fully aware of the changes that will be wrought by digital distribution and the net, which he mentions at the end. (Fair warning — it's long.)   

http://www.mgeitf.co.uk/MGEITF/pressoffice/news.asp?view=4&id=268&style=mgeitf&year=2005

<item> More about the beef </item>

My beef with Steve Gillmor was due to a collision between the values of conceptual quality, intellectual rigor and craft that form the foundation and working standard of the incumbent public media system, and the values of grassroots empowerment, free toolsets, open distribution, personal expression and improvisation that characterize the blog and podcasting world. 

More specifically, I was objecting to the Gillmor Daily show called "Broadband on the Run," where Steve ambushed Doc Searls in transit to a conference and dragged him into a rambling, off-the-cuff discussion of radio, podcasting and music copyrights — a very complicated subject.
 
After 22 years of radio syndication and 17 years operating an indie record label, I know a lot more about this stuff than I'd like, and I found the discussion scattered, inaccurate in many places, misleading and unbalanced. 80 minutes of underwater Skype + cell phone audio didn't help my mood either. And Steve's willful demonstration of copyright infringment by playing a Beatles track in the background on this show struck me as adolescent, proved nothing important, and changed nothing about the challenges we face as far as I'm concerned. 

I should be clear that I'm a deep admirer of Steve's insights into the tech space and Doc's work since Cluetrain. I normally agree with Doc's point of view on almost every issue. He is one of the wisest and best informed commentators in this area, and he obviously knows what he's talking about. I am also a huge fan of the Gillmor Gang podcasts, most of which are reference quality as a source of leading edge information content about technology, media and the Internet.

But in the case of this particular Gillmor Daily show, Steve — who often has an underlying techno-political, rather than journalistic, agenda — was bent on provoking Doc into a polarized argument that I thought mostly misleading.  Doc, disappointingly to me, was playing the role of the oppressed Libertarian, beset by draconian copyright regimes that prevent free use and reuse of existing music and video. No attempt whatsoever was made to explain any of the reasons why these practices came to exist and are being so vigorously defended by the incumbents. Nor was there any attempt to discuss how these issues might be reconciled going forward. I'd put up with it in a bar after a conference, but not on a program that purports to be informative about media and technology.

So, I complained — "viscerally" (Steve's word) — but I did it privately because I know that for all his bluster and occasionally slanderous public persona, Steve is very sensitive to criticism of his own work. I later apologized to Steve for the tone of the note, but not about my strong feelings for the subject or my criticism of the program itself.

Examining those feelings, I realized that my colleagues and I value deeply the traditions of quality in media, which have produced not only high performance standards, but are founded on a copyright and IP regime that many in the tech community find incomprehensible, onerous and restrictive.

I am certainly not a defender of everything about existing copyright laws — in fact I believe they are badly in need of a substantial overhaul for the network era — but it still pains me to hear otherwise intelligent technology advocates openly gloating over the loss of control over copyright that has been created by new distribution technologies, or inversely, whining about the restrictions to which they are subject. It's particularly annoying when those doing the talking are not making a living from their creative output, but from tangential or unrelated jobs. They talk, but few (Cory Doctorow is a conspicuous exception) have actually walked the walk.

I consider the relationships between broadcasting, publishing, copyright and business models to be the single most important set of issues facing everyone who is serious about developing more open digital media. Chris Nolan was absolutely right in a recent Gillmor Gang show ("Municipal Gang") to pull Steve up short and call for separate program to discuss the copyright issue when it came up in the context of a discussion of telecom carrier politics. 

I'm not an expert on this area, but I did participate in a vigorous online discussion of all these issues for several years on the "Pho" email list — an exhaustive, intelligent, mostly civilized conversation between copyright activists, academics, music business executives and lawyers, working musicians, and technologists. I suggested to Steve that there were at least a dozen people on Pho, particularly cofounder Jim Griffin, who would be more than qualified to do this discussion the right way, and I would be happy to make the necessary introductions. Steve chose not to pursue it and that's where the matter stands. I'd still like to hear that copyright show on Gillmor Gang.

<item> Conclusion </item>

"At the end of the day, the big difference between not-for-profit podcasting and commercial Nanocasting (i.e. commercialized long tail Internet audio programming) will be quality and professionalism."  — INA (International Nanocasting Alliance)

I believe that time will bear out this statement. It's about meeting a standard of quality which a group of smart and dedicated people have developed over the course of the last 75 years, a standard which an educated audience, at least, has come to expect. It's already happening with blogs, where there are almost no production cost issues and editing is easy and fast compared to audio and video.

I also believe, as Steve Gillmor has said on several occasions, that the worlds of incumbent public service media and at least some types of podcasting have much more in common than at variance with each other. But just as pubcasters have a lot to learn from the libertarian values, open standards, transparency and interactive ethics of the best in the online community, so do podcasters and vlogcasters have a lot to learn from us. We have a developed set of standards for media presentation and journalism that are eminently worth preserving and protecting.

As Jeremy Allaire points out about new media activists, "it's important that we don't believe our own bull."  

Despite superior distribution  technology and the best efforts of evangelists and provocateurs like Steve Gillmor — whose posts often end with some brilliant Rube Goldberg lash-up of what he calls the "burgeoning software-as-a-service architecture in waiting" — it's obvious to me, to other commentators (including members of the Gillmor Gang) and to most public broadcasters, that the mass of educated listeners and viewers will be lagging considerably behind the most creative and motivated early adopters of the online and tech community in joining this party. Of course we all realize there is a new audience eager to be served who may care a lot less about these values, but it doesn't change the fact that the bulk of the educated audience does, and will continue to do so.

So I think that despite the occasionally grandiose claims of Steve, Doug Kaye, the very cogent Ron Bloom of Podshow and other podcasting promoters, I agree with Doc Searls' position in "Broadband on the Run" that this is going to be a case of "and logic," not "or logic" — that new media will not fully displace older media, but take years to dilute its audience to one degree or another — especially when skilled incumbents with resources, like NPR, KCRW, KQED, WNYC and WGBH — are showing that they are agile enough to colonize the new distribution paradigms along with the early settlers. 

This is the downside of reducing barriers to entry. Once they get going, the pros can do it easier, faster, and generally better than all but the most organized and talented amateurs. They have greater experience and resources when it comes to creating quality programming –  particularly ongoing series. This accounts for the fact that professionally produced shows now account for over 90% of the iTunes top 100 podcast list, and the smutty charms of early podcast stars like Dawn and Drew are now off the list.

Every reasonable commentator predicts that we are heading toward a multi-layered media landscape where everything coexists at a new level of complexity. In my opinion there is too much audience inertia to overcome and too much new behavior to breed for this to happen as quickly as Steve Gillmor seems to think, at least for mainstream audiences. Early adopters are obviously the exception.  The oracular Andrew Odlyzko's 10 year diffusion estimates from the inception of new media innovations or distribution technology to dominance are probably still a good bet. And we'll need a hundred more Steve Jobs to make it all slick and easy enough to work for average users.

Even in the today's challenging media environment, conventional public radio broadcasters deliver over 12 BILLION listener hours every year in the U.S. — several orders of magnitude more than podcasters will achieve for years to come. And when the aggregate of Internet delivered programming finally reaches this level of penetration, the incumbent program brands and production expertise of public broadcasters will benefit disproportionally, as will brands and personalities from commercial radio who will have established their franchises online by leveraging their on-air resources to promote their online services during the transition. They can also aggregate the best of the new players into their own services.

2005 will be remembered as the year the lid finally came off media distribution. Personally, I look forward to discovering the unique talents that will emerge from podcasting. I just want to see the standards kept up. Do ya feel me, Brother Gillmor?
 

:: Stephen Hill 

stephen.hill@hos.com

http://www.hos.com

I missed the TechCrunch BBQ because of a previous long-standing commitment–a San Francisco Jazz Festival appearance by an old acquantance, Marcus Miller. In his own way, Marcus represents the same kind of transference of an elegant age to the new generation that Dave Winer has shouldered by his return to the Bay Area.

It's been 24 years since Marcus and I sat in a living room on Broad Beach in Malibu and recorded several tracks on my PortaStudio. To those who recognize the symbolism, yes, indeed, it was podcasting at an earlier dawn. Marcus was laying down work tapes, sketches, of songs for David Sanborn's follow up to his Voyeur album. I was staying at Sanborn's house, nursing a divorce from my first wife and apprenticing with Sanborn's next producer, Bob Margouleff.

That day, Marcus walked in from the beach-side door carrying an electric bass and a backpack. He was in town for a session and then back on the road with Miles Davis. Sanborn was asleep in the back of the house. For the next 2 hours, Marcus laid down three tracks, first Giant Steps to get the instruments (Mini-Moog, fretless bass, electric piano, drum machine) and the PortaStudio eqed and me comfortable with punching in, and then two songs, one of which made it on the next record in reproduced form.

For years after, I would play these tracks when I needed a lift, to calm down, remind myself what can come wholly formed out of the ether that is the musical mind. What struck me at the time was how Marcus would lay down a Moog bass line that would lay out for a complementary octave-up run he laid down three overdubs later with electric bass. Or the way the piano part would come to life and dance with the Moog lead parts that were almost cacaphonous without their imagined counterpoint yet to be recorded but heard all along.

And when our daughter Naomi was in the womb and scaring us to death with inactivity in the later stages of pregnancy, I'd put Marcus on and watch her begin to dance. Friday night, his genius, if that is what his God-given talent can be trivialized as, was there again. Never left.

Talking with Dave Winer today about his observation of a certain panic in this new tech outburst we're in, I allowed as how it wasn't fragile. As Dave agreed, there's nothing wrong with a little panic–it keeps the blood moving. But those who dispute the power of what we are living in, who fall back on entropy and credentials as a mark of authority, are kidding themselves. It felt great to see Marcus afterward, and laugh at the thought that we were so young then, and know that we still are. As Marcus said, recalling that day on the beach, "We had a lot of fun, didn't we."

Good grief. My friend Doc Searls has reacted big time to my suggestion that links are dead. OK, I was going to sugercoat it but if you insist….

Doc, last in first out. Links have leverage, attention doesn't? Well, every singloe new search play leverages attention characteristics– Sphere, Memorandum, Attensa, Google Reader–or will soon. By contrast, pagerank is oh so broken, as Doc has reminded us since the first day it started bubbling up in PubSub. The idea that authority is best transmitted by a coarse-grained gesture like linking is bankrupted by the sheer volume of gaming that is emerging. Isn't this kneejerk response by Doc the same one the networks had when Neilsen first tryed moving from diaries to set top boxes?

Calling me passive aggresive is a page view slime in an attention world. Let me be clear, Doc. I appreciate links, I just appreciate more attention-focused gestures more. In a page view model, links drive flow which drives adsense revenue. In an attention model, citations drive subscriptions which drives reader/participant relationships. This is so far from passive it's not funny. I am specifically and overtly not linking to drive people to RSS and its fundamental time efficiency. Is linking passive aggresive by driving people away from RSS andf back to the page viedw model? No. Neither is what I am doing.

I'll forgive Doc the confusion between attention.xml and attentiontrust.org. Attention.xml is a specification co-conceived with David Sifry, and AttentionTrust.org is a non-profit co-founded with Seth Goldstein. I would expect attention.xml to be approved as an attentiontrust-compliant spec if submitted by Technorati, who are the authors and developers of said spec, given that it supports the four fundamental principles of the Trust. I am President of the Trust, but have no relationship other than the original idea with attention.xml.

But Doc is the pot calling the kettle black with this sentence:

And hey, Steve, if you want people to know what the hell you mean by "attention", how about pointing to searches like this one? Or to AttentionTrust.org? Might actually be helpful. And, more importanlty, non-manipulative.

First, I have no interest in driving people to Google for a search on attention.xml when I'm putting all my energies into AttentionTrust. Most of the hits on that search come back to me, which I assume people have already read. I'm trying to save people time, not add to their overload. That's why attention is so important, and why it doesn't need the kind of manipulative pointing that Doc surprisingly seems to suggest. Now my using the world manipulative there is a cheap shot. Sorry. So is non-manipulative.

Finally, my careful and stingy use of words and links has consistently caused me trouble with a series of editors and managers at virtually all of the trade publications I've worked for over the past 20 years. If I was trying to manipulate them, I would not choose a strategy that has gotten me fired for biting the hand that feeds me. It is a tribute to Dan Farber that, so far, he has not censored my comments on the death of the very page view model that he and others labor under. I also take comfort in reminding myself, as John Furrier did in an interview with me today, that I have been vilified as crazy for a good long time. About RSS. Now about attention. Crazy like a fox.

Oh, here's your link, Doc. It doesn't mean I don't love you. But I put it at the bottom for the minute number of people who haven't read you already.

I'm headed over to the Copocabana for BlogOn II Day I. On JetBlue I read some of Seth Godin's book on cows and attention, watched West Wing and Law 'n Odor Special Edition II with the guy from L&O I and Anabella Sciorra (sorry if I mangled that, where's my autospell, Matt), and watched the White Sox clinch the pennant. Note to airlines: I scheduled the flight to match the game and West Wing. As the Journal points out this morning about eyeTunes, Holy Disruption, Batman.

Mike Arrington tries to suggest I (we) OFGNs are wrong about links. Nice try, kid. We're not wrong. Links are oh so BrinRank. Attention is the new coin of the Empire.

It's not what you do that counts, it's what you don't do.

–iPlodius

Dan Farber was strangely quiet for the first half of the new Gillmor Gang, and now we know why. He was taking notes. Monday at Yahoo! Research I glanced over at Dan during lunch and he was taking notes. Last week at Web 2.0 I came in late to a conversation between John Battelle and Sergey Brin. I checked… Farber was taking notes.

Plus: a new Gillmor Daily with Doc at the Dump.

Just got back from breakfast at Max's with Dave Winer, Mike Arrington, and Craig Cline. I, like Dave, had the 4-cheese omelette. Not there were Scoble, Gabe Memorandum, or Chris Pirillo, though they were discussed at length.

I spent a good deal of time educating Mike on the inherent value of NOT linking, asking the following key question:

• Which would you prefer, that I link to you or mention your name and not link to you?

Mike says "link, every time." I say "wrong." Mike's way, he gets flow, page views, and, eventually, linkspam. My way, Mike Arrington gets typed into Google et al, vanity feeds spring to life, and people subscribe. His way: page views. My way: sub love.

It's not who you know that counts, but who, what, and for how long.

–iPlodius

While my brother worries about Microsoft buying their way out of trouble, Dave Winer tells AttentionTech (Sirius 103 5pm Pacific 8pm Eastern) that just when Redmond finally gets RSS, it's still too late. Can they both be right? Nope.

Meanwhile, I'm off to NY Sunday for BlogOn and some Attention-related announcements. Those who've downloaded the Recorder, stand by for some more places to put your attention. Those in the AttentionTrust queue, we should clear the logjam shortly.

Gillmor Gangers should receive a new one tomorrow evening.

Me, I'm off to watch Commander in Chief. Now that would be a good $1.99 download for the plane while we wait for NBC to unlock West Wing and Criminal Intent. Viacom, please free Daily Show and Craig Ferguson. Now back to our movie, Death of the Page View Model, starring Pat Kenealy and The Incumbents.

I click therefore I am
–iPlodius

Most telling moment of the Web 2.0 conference: when asked how many in the room use GMail, at least 80% of hands went up.

Least telling moment of the Web 2.0 conference: when people argued that we don't own our own metadata (not once).

Closest San Francisco gets to being The City: when someone said they were so tired they felt like they were back home in New York.

Closest to the truth: Marc Canter when he looked around the raging reception and bemoaned the fact he wasn't getting paid for this.

People who did good jobs last week: John Battelle, Tim O'Reilly, Esther Dyson, Mike Arrington, Jeff Clavier, Om Malik, Seth Goldstein, Greg Yardley, Stan James, Dan Farber, Jason Calacanis, Dare Obasanjo, Hank Barry.

Thanks: Mary Hodder, Ed Batista, the OurMedia Advisory Board.

Next moment I'm looking forward to: Marcus Miller at the San Francisco Jazz Festival Friday October 21st.

Tomorrow on AttentionTech: Jason Shellen on Google Reader.

Ray Ozzie and Jonathan Schwartz are channeling the same line about Photoshop not being built on AJAX. But Schwartz is disingeneous at best when he suggests there is no need for an AJAX-based Office replacement. In fact, that's exactly what I want, a calendar app, an RSS hub, and a wireless router (hello Apple.) Last night at dinner Ozzie got about half way to the mindset where this model fully takes over. He's got big reasons to bet on entropy and what he calls the combination of software and services, but Google and Skype already have my business. It's my take that the audience is in no mood for financing pragmatic change management on the backs of outmoded business models, whether they be in the media or the tech platform community. Weblogs' AOL buy is the latest gong. As Schwartz said this morning, distribution is everything. And I will personally bet Jonathan all my Sun stock (none) that the JVM/toolbar will soon push the next set of Office bits down to my Firefox client. Or I'll go elsewhere.

Dan Farber, as usual, teases out the essence of the McNealy/Schmidt show. But Dan must be kidding when he points at Joe Wilcox's warning to Microsoft to stop obsessing about Google. Redmond obsessed Netscape into the ground, but won't be able to derail this express, particularly because it's not just Google but everybody who wins in this reboot.

Similarly, I love Dana Gardner's style but not his substance. This deal is not some mercy date, but rather a barter deal where Google trades airtime (advertising) for hardware, auto-update for synchronization across the RSS blood/brain barrier, and auto-save for the 2-way Web. Sun drives its strength with the carriers from cell phones to the AJAX desktop, not the other way around. Keep up that advice, Joe and Dana: Following it is just what Sun and Google need to pull this off.

Thanks to Dan Farber for listening (and pointing) to the Sirius cast of our conversation with Seth Goldstein of AttentionTrust.org. It's the second of 4 AttentionTech casts that are currently stored somewhat secretly at the URL Dan published. You can guess what the others are, the third being with Robert "The Bunny" Scoble and the most recent with Web 2.0 and The Search's John Battelle. Tomorrow we find out what's up with Sun and Google, and then it's the debut of the Attention Recorder on Wednesday at 1:30 at Web 2.0. I'll post the URL for ZDNet readers to download the plugin that morning. Stay tuned.

I'm reading Tim O'Reilly's positioning statement on Web 2.0 and preparing for a conversation with John Battelle for Monday's Attention Tech broadcast on Sirius. The show, a collaboration with Mike Vizard (formerly of CRN), debuted Thursday the 29th on Sirius 103, together with Podshows from Adam Curry, Madge Weinstein, Dawn and Drew, and others. You can hear it at 5PM Pacific/8PM Eastern. We'll be releasing the casts on the Net as soon as I get the time to arrange for a site. In the meantime I may post them on Gillmor Daily.

Tim's piece is timely, measured, and anchored by an important nod to the history of RSS and Dave Winer's role. Battelle's book, The Search, is a methodical but subtly lyrical detective story about the rise of Google. Together, Battelle and O'Reilly are approaching a mature plateau from which Battelle is launching his FM Publishing startup and O'Reilly a new wave of what Tim calls the Age of Participation. I'll be looking to Ray Ozzie's talk as an indication of both what role Microsoft will play in the Web's reboot and whether the politics of cooperation will be built out across once-fractious lines.

Google has raised its cone of silence on CNet, as evidenced by this interview with Eric Schmidt by News.com's Elinor Mills:

"We're celebrating our seventh birthday…. We had a pretty strong year," Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a phone interview with CNET News.com, as he listed the launch of new products including Google Talk, Google Earth, Google Video and Google Desktop Search.

Congrats, Google. Rest in peace, Max.