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Steve Gillmor's GestureLab

How can you be…March 16

I’ve just launched a new blog over on eWeek.com at http://blogs.eweek.com/newsgang/. In addition to writing the blog, I’ll be working with Ziff Davis Enterprise Editorial Director Mike Vizard on video and audio chats focusing on enterprise issues. For me, this is a return to the enterprise as well as an opportunity to bring together the best of the blogosphere as we grapple with the convergence of cloud computing, social media, and the transformation of 20th century platforms into the disruptive attention-based ad hoc network of today.

I’m not sure of the role GestureLab will play moving forward, but imagine that there may well be some tangents and perspectives not necessarily ready for prime time in the enterprise sense. For now I’ll keep it as is, with the expectations set very low given my infrequent postings over the last year. But as RSS has always empowered, keeping the feed in your reader will work just fine if anything pops up. Perhaps this blog will function something like Crunchnotes does for Mike Arrington. But something tells me I’ll be working hard to sneak everything past the eWeek filter, just as I’ve been doing for years now going back to Ahead of the Curve in InfoWorld and most recently InfoRouter at ZDNet. See you over at NewsGang in a minute.

The Attention Operating SystemFebruary 12

Microsoft’s Yahoo takeover, whether successful short or long-term, marks an historic change in Microsoft’s perception of its role at the center of the computing universe. Certainly Google’s rise has focused the Redmond mind on the task it must confront, not just with Google’s advertising dominance but also its dagger to the heart of Microsoft’s crown jewels, Office. At its most basic level, the Yahoo deal allows Microsoft to clone Google Apps and blunt the hemorrhaging of a new Net-aware generation away from the current hardware bound Office.

We can argue whether the forced merger of MSN/Live and Yahoo’s services will be easy or difficult, but those who predict distraction and brain drain should remember that Ray Ozzie was the central factor in the IBM/Lotus acquisition that allowed continuity and pragmatics to preside over what turned out to be a successful combination. Notes and Domino achieved a critical mass in resources and seats that it needed to blunt the Y2K Exchange challenge, and IBM bought the time it needed to invest in open source and build out a platform for Global Services to ride on.

Similarly, Microsoft can use the Yahoo seats to deliver an 80-20 version of Office while financing the transition with improved response for brand advertising hung off of Yahoo media properties and rich media services such as Flickr. Banner ads don’t attack Google’s advertiser/relevance stranglehold, but they do pay for the migration to an on-deman

The 5th GuyFebruary 3

Conventional wisdom:

Social advertising doesn’t work because users are there for friends, not buying stuff.
Google reports weak results from MySpace deal, blaming missed numbers on bad estimates of social advertising yield.
Microsoft Yahoo takeover is about advertising.

Problems with that view for me, personally:

I don’t use search. Not externally, that is. I use Gmail search all the time, because my entire breadcrumb trail has been embedded there for 3 years now. So for me, search advertising doesn’t work, at all. My eyeballs are rarely focused on Adsense because they’re mostly focused on Twitter, gmail, and Google Reader shared items as triaged commonly via NewsGang. Mostly, I don’t search data, I search people’s searches of data.

So if search advertising doesn’t work with me (at least directly) what does that say about social advertising. For me, it works better than Google because it’s the affinity groups that I’m valuing, not the expression of my intent through keywords. Key to my information processing is understanding the context of the filter, not the descriptions of the containers or memes that surround the targets. That is the value proposition of Facebook and Twitter, which together conspire to route my attention dramatically more efficiently than previous methods.

Viewed in this lens, the Microsoft attack on Yahoo portends a dramatic shift in Redmond’s ability

NewsGang LivesJanuary 22

Today we recorded a new daily show, NewsGang Live. It is designed to take the fundamentals of The Gang and mix them with the daily flow of news and views that emerge from the NewsGang application. Today’s live show focused on last night’s Democratic debate in South Carolina, and featured members of The Gang (Dan Farber, Doc Searls, Dana Gardner) as well as Obama supporter Mitchell Kertzman and Edwards supporter Dave Slusher, plus several listeners including Chris Kelley who joined the end of the show with some Republican perspective.

The format of the show grows out of the most recent Gang episode, where Jason Calacanis gave out enough of the dial-in information on Twitter to attract some 20 additional callers, one of which, Larry Miller, joined the show and contributed both to the interesting aspects of the show and my gathering perception that the show is not working effectively to capture and nurture those aspects of The Gang and its predecessor The Gillmor Gang that endear it to both participants and listeners. Today’s NewsGang suggests that a careful mixture of various elements may produce a product that will justify continuing this work, though it is not clear to me that the members of the core Gang can work effectively together in the original structure.

On the second part of the last Gang, I clearly set out my requirements for the show. Much of the dichotomy of the show’s agenda revolves around what to some (i

DAAS BootJanuary 18

Started the day with the latest salesforce.com event at the Palace, the first of a hundred-city Tour de Force to evangelize developers into the Force.com development as a service (DAAS) platform now up and running. Marc Benioff and Marc Andreesen had a fireside chat where they seemed to be interested in the similarities between salesforce’s enterprise Web services and Ning’s consumer Web services. In fact, they are sitting on opposite sides of the elephant and somehow don’t see that there is virtually no distinction. As Marc A. noted, entrpreneurs now have the ability to put a startup on its feet for virtually (keyword) no money, making investment (from Marc’s perspective) safer. Of course, Marc B.’s strategy is to grow his developer cloud, or in Marc the Other’s terminology, makes commitment to the Force platform “safer.” As Andreesen noted, all you need is a bunch of MacBook Pro’s and a Net connection.

At lunch I sat next to the new salesforce executive in charge of all things developer, and she told me of her response to the question of what metric would be used as a success indicator: “How many developers sign on by the end of the week.” Benioff blew a little smoke about how the Oracle and Sun deals represent the end stage of the last generation of dev tools, suggesting we were now moving into dev services. I say smoke because it was gratui