The Allchin Seat
While I'm editing yesterday's Gillmor Gang session, a few gestures on feed dynamics:
John Battelle's inline ads for the New York Times are getting my attention. I carefully examined the offer ($2.40 a week for home delivery) before moving to the next item. I prefer the presentation, especially in return for John's full text feed. By contrast, ZDnet's and Ziff Davis' feeds (Mary Jo Foley's and Between the Lines in reverse order for example) both suffer from their lack of support for the Attention model rather than the PageRank View model. Matt McAlister's delicious feed points at Brad Feld's tippage away from PVM and towards AVM.
Similarly, Gang member Dana Gardner's blog is behind a PVM wall but Stephen O'Grady's delicious feed pushed me over the edge by disagreeing with Dana about Netbeans. While I'm at it, I'll sub to Dana's Briefings Direct page but only as a prelude to pushing it further down my Attention list until Dan Farber frees the feed. Of course, Dana probably gets paid in PVM dollars so he may need to take a pay cut to get there. The question is: is it worth the investment? Battelle thinks so.
Speaking of investments, would Matt Mullenweg please add auto-save to Wordpress and let me know when it's in there. Thanks.
It's good to see Jim Allchin taking a victory lap as he nears the end of his career as the single most important Microsoft executive. Jim's hammerlock on the company as Keeper of the Flame and, accordingly, Gatekeeper of the Windows and Office monopolies may have served Bill Gates well as the Chairman jousted with the DOJ and the Valley, but his fierce intelligence and tenacity created the necessary methodology to attack the transition to the Enterprise. But Jim's toughest job remains: using his clout with the Windows and Office teams to shepherd Ray Ozzie and the Live team into the browser-agnostic platform of the Attention Age. Ozzie's tenuous grip on the Allchin seat needs to be buttressed, and noone but Jim can proffer this baton. Blogger dinners and MSM briefings are all well and good, but shame on Wagg Ed for ducking the opportunity for Jim to hear this message directly.