And the Wind Cries Larry
The last few days have seen a real ramp up of attention/gesture stuff. The combination of Bloggercon and Supernova this week and Gnomedex next week have brought many of the constituents of the so-called Attention Economy into view. One of the incipient players--Jellyfish--are embargoing their story until Monday to take advantage of a Wall Street Journal exclusive, but scuttlebut by some attention geeks seems to indicate they are intermediaries between users and some sort of attention marketplace.
I sat in on an AttentionTrust board meeting along with Christine Herron of Omidyar as friends of the non-profit I co-founded with Seth Goldstein. It was exciting to see what the Omidyar support and Executive Director Ed Batista's full court press are doing to consolidate the Trust's gains. GestureBank architect Robert Anderson shipped the IE 6/7 alpha recorder to testers this afternoon. Seth and Father of Attention Michael Goldhaber shared coffee with Jonah Goldstein and me near City Hall. Public Radio's Stephen Hill sent me Goldhaber's most recent First Monday speech on Openness and Attention, which I inhaled in between chapters of this amazing Jimi Hendrix history.
I snuck into Supernova to see the panel with Craig Newmark and Seth's wife and AOL power broker Tina Sharkey. Then I repaired to the lobby couches and watched Seth and Jonas giggle like grade-schoolers as their Root worm widgets began to tunnel their way into the Root architecture. Jonas and I debated the analogy between Hendrix feedback and the Widget/worm platform. Craig came over and sipped from the Palace Hotel wifi, pronouncing it better than the Supernova feed. Then Craig ran through his comedy stylings for me over ice lattes (or some version of coffee and icecream or white goo for Craig) at the Starbucks down the street.In a Pirandellian moment, I read Craig's Chronicle and flipped past a Valleywag (mispelled with the capital W embedded) story on Craig recycled by the ChronBlog with what Craig called a humor value add.
Speaking of Valleywag, I think I've discovered how to game the Nickster--say nice things about him. He's looking for the thin skin rebound and doesn't know quite what to do with the warm fuzzies. Seriously, he's one funny dude. He's getting a run for his money from Nick Carr, however. Good luck on attacking David Berlind over the Jon Udell Affair. Seriously, links are dead.
Speaking of Steve Ballmer, Dave Winer has it wrong. Ballmer is critical to Microsoft's survival. There, I've now instituted my new campaign to never get onto Scripting News again. Remember: links are dead. Now, citations are also dead. I explained my theory to Michael Goldhaber and he promptly wrote it down in his notebook. So I figure now it's time to see if never appearing on Scripting News will do anything to slow down the Attention Snowball. I bet not.
Doc Searls and I recorded Attention Deficit Theatre II about 2 weeks ago. I made a special copy of it for Dave to listen to on the way back from NY but he didn't. When he did, he quoted one line from it, the Johnny Carson joke. I figured that meant he didn't like it. I was right. Doc and I are seriously off the rails on this one, so much so that I am afraid to release it for fear that it might be classified as a munition by Rumsfeld. All I can say is that Scoble is in for a treat.
We're going to try and record this week's Gillmor Gang tomorrow during Bloggercon lunch. Together with the Hugh Macleod Attention Deficit Gang, the famous never-to-see-daylight Dyson Meltdown Gang, and last week's I Told You So Gang gloatfest, I think it's time to leave some masters in a cab like Hendrix did with Axis Bold As Love.