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Attention traders

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I’ve got some random loose end posts from my time at last week’s conference that I really should post before they get any older. Here’s one…

Seth Goldstein of Root.net introduced his company’s Vaults product, which aims to give individual consumers a place to bank their “attention data.” Today you can open a “vault” for free and stash your Amazon purchase history and your general clickstream data (derived from a browser plug-in); tomorrow, presumably, much more. Goldstein talked about “PPAs” (“promises to pay attention”) and “attention bonds” and drew a comparison with the way the mortgage industry’s adoption of mortgage bonds helped make housing more affordable.

Well, everyone needs a place to live; what problem is Root aiming to solve? The idea seems to be: Companies are already collecting and claiming large amounts of information about our financial lives and online behavior. That’s data that we ought, by rights, to control — and if it’s going to be exploited commercially, we should get our slice.

Fair enough. But the Root Vaults idea applies a Wall Street mentality to the “attention economy” concept, and when Goldstein unveiled the Vault home screen before the ETech crowd, it resembled nothing so much as a sort of Bloomberg screen for the mind. There’s something potentially dismal about this — are we going to convert every last remnant and scrap of our earthly existence into the margin-eking terms of financial markets?

On the one hand, I can imagine Root Vaults as offering a nifty way for us all to do what Howard Rheingold long ago advocated — pay attention to where we’re paying attention. On the other hand, I’m wary of letting the bond-trading worldview colonize my choices of entertainment and edification. I’m not looking to become the CEO of my own mind, fiddling with spreadsheet optimizations of my own personal satisfaction.

I mentioned this reaction to Goldstein, and he readily admitted that clickstream data has its limits: “You gotta start somewhere. Is it an accurate representation of a person? No. You don’t want to reduce people to data on a Bloomberg dashboard. But this is a natural resource that people are already producing.”

Ozzie at the clipboard, Stone at attention

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Tuesday here at began with Ray Ozzie, once of Groove and now of Microsoft, demoing the prototype for an absurdly simple yet marvelously useful little innovation: the ability to cut and paste events, using the Windows clipboard, such that they move from application to application (and Web app to Web app) with their structure and metadata intact. It’s a little thing, in one sense — but just the sort of little thing that stands in the way of the Web-based information realm being fully useful. That Microsoft is helping lead this change rather than fighting it to the last byte is remarkable. That Ozzie did his demo using Firefox was simply gracious. (He writes in detail about the project on his blog.)

Jeff Han showed his research into “multi-touch interaction” — giant touch-screens that respond to complex commands delivered via more than one point of touch. The interface hardly seemed as intuitive as Han promised (two fingers zooms in — or is it out?), and some of the demo resembled the manipulation of a virtual lava lamp. But when Han turned his interface into a giant light-table and showed how perfectly it was suited for the organization of large numbers of photos — and videos! — the value of the innovation became immediately apparent.

The ostensible theme of the conference this year is “The Attention Economy,” but most speakers barely addressed it. One notable exception was Linda Stone, the former Microsoft and Apple exec who coined the phrase “continuous partial attention” back in 1998 and unpacked the term for us a bit here. (There are good notes from Nat Torkington on a similar talk she gave at Supernova last year.) She distinguished multitasking — where you’re switching between discrete goal-oriented processes — from the more diffuse and corrosive continuous partial attention, in which we are constantly “scanning for opportunities, optimizing for the best opportunity,” paying half a mind to what’s in front of us and keeping our peripheral vision peeled in hope of spotting something better. Stone says we’re driven by CPA out of a “desire to be a live node on the network,” to stay connected and to feel validated that we fit into a social web.

Stone placed CPA in a social-history timeline that falls into 20-year spans: a period from 1965 to 1985 in which we placed highest value on self-expression, creativity and personal productivity; then a period from 1985 to 2005 in which the network became paramount and we valued communication the most. I found this explanation so generalized as to be almost useless — “We played Battleship in the ’70s, we played Diplomacy in the ’90s,” she declared, but wait a minute, I played Diplomacy in the ’70s, and so did all my friends!

Nonetheless, Stone is onto something important here. Her description of our “overwhelmed, overstimulated and underfulfilled” technological existence wasn’t exactly what the technology-besotted ETech crowd wanted to hear, but they needed to hear it. Still, as I looked around at a sea of heads buried in laptops, sucking down the wi-fi, fingers darting to catch the latest email or Technorati result, I wondered how many had given Stone the attention she deserved.

Sterling language

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I loved the two Bloggercons I participated in, and I share the enthusiasm expressed by Dave Winer and the BarCamp people and the MashupCamp people for the whole “unconference” idea — the notion that great gatherings can happen when you put great people together in rooms without programming lots of speeches and panels and product demos.

Still, I’m not ready to give up on the occasional old-fashioned lecture, under the right circumstances, and there are some people in whose presence I will gladly say, “I am an audience member — you talk, I’ll shut up.” Bruce Sterling is one of them. He spoke tonight here at

I haven’t heard Sterling in several years, and I’d forgotten his peculiar cadence — a kind of incantatory precision that you first mistake for superciliousness and then realize, no, wait, those pauses and touches of drawl aren’t affectation, he’s just savoring those words, he loves them, he doesn’t want to say goodbye to them quite yet.

Sterling’s ostensible subject was “The Internet of Things,” and he talked a bit about the stuff he’s been talking about for some time now: spimes, physical objects trackable in space and time, material things that are — like items on today’s Web — linkable, rankable, sortable and searchable. It’s a fascinating topic, even the second or third time around; but the heart of tonight’s talk was a series of observations on language and technology.

“Computer,” Sterling argued, was simply an awful name for these machines that arrived in the middle of last century. “Computer” led us straight to “artificial intelligence,” down the dead-end street that had us thinking the machines could become smart — that they were “thinking machines.” We should have picked a word more like what the French chose, “Ordinateur,” suggesting that the devices, uh, ordinate things. They are card shuffling tools. They do what we see the Google-ized Web doing so well today — link, rank, sort and search. “I think we could have done better words,” Sterling said — and if we had, we might have gotten Google 20 years sooner.

He went on to parse some Web 2.0-speak, first decoding Tim O’Reilly’s definition of the phrase, then dissecting scholar Alan Liu‘s critique of the phenomenon, at every turn reminding this crowd of “alpha geeks” that the labels they pick for their innovations really do make a difference.

“You don’t want to freeze your language too early,” Sterling advised — that stops creativity in its tracks. Hype, he suggested, is underrated: “Hype is a system-call on your attention.” Buying into it blindly is a disaster, of course, but “if you soberly track its development, hype is revealing…. In politics, the opposite of hype is the truth, but in technology, the opposite of hype is argot, jargon” — language that has no traction in the real world. And “if no one is dismissing you as hype, you are not being loud enough.”

Sterling cited a recent interview with Adam Greenfield, the author of a new book called Everyware that’s also about a version of “the Internet of Things.” In the interview, Greenfield said he coined the term “Everyware” to describe his take on the concept others have labeled “ubiquitous computing” because “I wanted people relatively new to these ideas to be able to have a rough container for them, so they could be discussed without anyone getting bogged down in internecine definitional struggles.”

But wait, Sterling cried — “getting bogged down in internecine definitional struggles” is exactly where we should be when we’re inventing new things. This is “the wetlands of language”, where we “use words to figure out what things mean.” The struggles count; they help us understand and shape what we’re doing. Choosing a label for a technology, he argued, “really matters — it’s like christening a baby.”

There was much more. If the good folks at ITConversations post the audio, or if Sterling posts a text, I’ll link so you can experience the whole thing — including the full shtick about Alan Turing’s head in a box, which I’m afraid I failed to take good notes on, since I was too busy laughing.

It would take a good video, though, to capture the funniest moment of the evening: Sterling was displaying examples of “receding tech” (“things that do not blog or link”) — a rusty engine block half-buried in desert sand, a mountain of discarded tires — when the projection screen flashed a warning window: YOU ARE NOW RUNNING ON RESERVE POWER. Then the laptop went to sleep. He was wrapping up, anyway.

Etech 2006

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I’m here in San Diego at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, an event that I had the pleasure of attending in 2003 and 2004 but which I skipped last year while I was trying to get some traction on my book.

In my absence the conference moved from the relatively cozy confines of the Westin Horton Plaza to the vastness of the Manchester Grand Hyatt — two tall towers on the edge of the harbor. This feels like a place not for things that are emerging but rather for things that have conquered.

Web 2.0 jottings

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Today I had to get some writing done, so I stayed away from the final sessions of Web 2.0 — where apparently, among other things, Google announced a new RSS reader (which was totally slammed and unreachable when I tried to visit earlier). But here are some notes from yesterday’s sessions.

I hadn’t heard of Writely before; it’s another Ajax-style Web app transposing a traditional software function into web-based software — in this case, word-processing. I’m putting it in the “check out when I have time” bin.

By many accounts, Zimbra was the hottest product to launch at the conference’s 13-company “Launchpad,” which featured plenty of other interesting debuts (Jeff Jarvis has good notes on the others). Zimbra is an Ajax-based Outlook replacement (e-mail, calendar, contacts). Its apparent homage to an old Talking Heads song was duly noted by whoever was running the music at Web 2.0; “I Zimbra,” the cryptic lead track from “Fear of Music,” could be heard between panels.

At the open source panel, Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz tried very hard to persuade us that what was really important about open source software isn’t that the code is open or that anyone can improve it but simply that it’s given away free. Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker did an excellent job of debunking this point of view, not by directly disputing it but by explaining exactly what’s so great about Firefox: “Our goal is to make things easy to change,” she said. “It’s easy to try things out. You can try things out quickly. We can try 15 or 20 things at once and see which work.”

And, she added, that “we” there? “It isn’t us.” That is, the people trying out 15 or 20 things aren’t sitting in the offices of the Mozilla Foundation or even part of the core development team; they’re all over the Web. And they can try those things out because, er, the code is open, not because the product costs zero dollars. Sure, most Firefox users aren’t programmers and can’t do anything with the source themselves. But they can benefit from a much broader set of improvements and options made possible by the open source model.

Jeremy Allaire debuted Brightcove, which looked basically like a content management system for video — not that interesting for end-users, but more for video producers or large-site managers looking to integrate more video. Still, pretty impressive as a well-thought-out approach to bringing more commercial video content onto the Web in ways that don’t totally freak out the “content owners” yet are not entirely hostile to the medium.

Jason Fried of 37signals offered a ten-minute rant on the virtues of “less” as a competitive advantage: “It takes three people to build anything online these days: if you have more than three people, you have too many.”

AOL’s Jonathan Miller told an amusing story of how, when he took over the company in the depths of the dot-com doldrums, he handled the resentment he found at various divisions of Time Warner, where employees and execs were disgruntled about how the AOL/Time merger had gone — they felt they’d been snookered by AOL. He told them about having his car towed in Manhattan, and visiting the godforsaken place you go to get your car, and waiting in line forever, and getting angrier and angrier, and finally getting to the front of the line and seeing a sign that read: “The person here did not tow your car. They are here to help you get your car back. If you cooperate, you will get your car back faster.”

That’s what he told the unhappy Time campers: “I did not tow your car.”

Mickey Hart was on stage at the end of the day Thursday, talking about the history of the Dead and the “tapers” the band allowed to record their shows. He pointed out ways in which that community was similar to today’s file-trading hordes, and ways that it was different. But one thing he said stood out for me: The Dead played for pay and they played for free; “we always played better when we played free.”

Diller’s tale

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Barry Diller was the kickoff interview here at Web 2.0 yesterday afternoon, which was more than a little odd, because Barry Diller does not appear to have anything to do with Web 2.0 — if, by Web 2.0, we mean, as conference hosts John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly said, an approach that involves innovation on the Web platform, an “architecture of participation,” lightweight business models, Web services with no lock-in, and so on.

No one has been smarter than Diller about rummaging through the broken and disused parts of old-Web flameouts and using them to assemble money-generating machines in relatively dull markets. And yet he has had no success — maybe even no interest — in creating innovative services or bringing new ideas to the Web. His company is a sort of Night of the Living Dot Com Dead.

Diller does not suffer fools — or interviewers — gladly, and he reserves a special sardonic disdain for tech-industry hype. That can be refreshing. I first heard his digital-skeptic act over a decade ago, at a panel at the old Intermedia conference in 1993, where he shared the stage with Bill Gates, Apple’s John Sculley and cable mogul John Malone. While the other spouted visionary platitudes, Diller simply fumed at their disconnection from his reality. (I wrote about the event for my old paper, here.)

Today, Diller is still wearing his skeptic’s hat; at Web 2.0 he turned it on those among the new wave of Web visionaries who have dared to dream that our new publishing and searching technologies might help bring a wider conversation into being beyond control of the broadcast world’s gatekeepers. “There’s just not that much talent in the world,” Diller says, “and talent almost always outs.”

On the one hand, Diller likes the Web, because it makes it easier for people to strut their stuff, if they have any: “If you have an idea, you can get it up and out, and good ideas resonate.” On the other hand, don’t expect some sort of renaissance of creativity to happen when the Web allows us to tap the talents of a wider swath of humanity: “I think that entertainment — TV, movies, games — I think it’s going to be a relatively few people who do that, simply because there is not enough talent, and it is not hiding out somewhere…”

For Diller, in other words, the Long Tail has no snap. Putting the tools of creation and distribution into the hands of the 99 percent of humanity who have hitherto had no access to them won’t fill a bigger pool of culture; the existing talent scouts of Hollywood and its equivalents have already done perfectly well, thank you, at tapping all the talent that’s there.

I’m sorry, I worked for 15 years as a theater and movie critic, and I know that Diller is wrong. Sure, I did my time working at a theater reading the slush pile of unproduced play submissions; I spent too many hours watching the awful 95 percent of movies that do manage to get produced and released. I don’t have any illusions about repealing Sturgeon’s Law.

But the promise of the Net, still not fulfilled but hanging there hopefully before us, is that a free, open, teeming network can actually provide more opportunity for “talent” to “out” than a handful of overworked script readers, slush-pile combers and A&R men. To think otherwise — to think that the existing corporate cultural system is the most efficient mechanism imaginable for the identification of artistic talent — is pure arrogance.

Based on what he said here, I think Barry Diller believes he is someone who understands the Internet because he knows so well how to make money through it. But I don’t believe he understands the first thing about what makes it anything more than just a money machine.

Pop the bubbly

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John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly opened the second edition of the Web 2.0 conference this afternoon with an exchange along these lines: Battelle said that last year, the mood at the conference was simply, “We made it” — we survived the Internet industry’s dark winter. This year, he said, it’s more like, “Something really important is going on — let’s not screw it up.” O’Reilly added: “We are definitely running the risk of another hype cycle.”

I’d say it’s no longer a risk, it’s a reality. It’s too late in the evening to post too much about what I saw and heard today at Web 2.0 — more tomorrow. But let’s just say that the whiff of bubble-mania that was in the air at the conference’s first edition a year ago has now blossomed into a heady eau de dot-com.

The conference mixes up idealistic developers who have worked themselves half-blind coding the next super-cool but not-quite-usable-yet Web applications with sharp-eyed financiers looking for the next big thing that they can flip fast for a killing. In this regard, Web 2.0 — both the conference and the vague but real thing it is named for — is like the bastard offspring of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and the tech-investment gatherings of yore.

I do not know what will come of this not-so-holy union, but from the feel of things at the Hotel Argent today, it seems likely that a certain number of people will get rich, a certain amount of money will be wasted, several important new companies and technologies will emerge and some indeterminate number of investors will be fleeced. So that means it’s probably too late, John and Tim — the hype-cycle wheel is already in spin, up, up, up.

Notable events

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I have been hunkered down writing, sticking religiously to the schedule I’ve imposed on myself. But I’ll venture forth from my den over the next couple weeks for a few things.

Tonight, I’m planning to go hear Ray Kurzweil talk at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco, as part of the Long Now Foundation’s seminars. I’ve always found Kurzweil’s vision of “the coming singularity” as interesting to ponder as it is hard to believe. He’s got a new book on the subject, too, titled “The Singularity is Near.”

A week from Monday, I’ll be back in San Francisco to hear B.K.S. Iyengar, the founder of modern yoga, speak. I’ve been practicing Iyengar-style yoga for more than 10 years now, though I still feel very much like a beginner; it’s kept me sane through some major crises, including becoming a parent, being a parent, nursing a company through financial straits, and trying to write a book. Iyengar is 86 now, and says this visit to the U.S. (in part a book tour) will be his last. I’ll just be hearing him lecture; my wife, Dayna Macy, leaves this weekend for a week-long conference in Colorado organized by her company, Yoga Journal, where he’s giving a workshop, too. And she’ll be blogging about it (along with a former Salon colleague, Kaitlin Quistgaard, and other Yoga Journal folks).

Two weeks from now (10/7-9) is the latest edition of the Digital Storytelling Festival, to be held for the first time in San Francisco, over at KQED headquarters. I’ll only be able to attend part of the fest this year (I’ll be participating in a presentation about the work of the late festival founder, Dana Atchley) because it’s the weekend we celebrate our boys’ birthday, too. But I’m sure the whole thing will be great.

Finally, also that week, I’ll be trying to keep up with as much as I can of the second edition of Web 2.0, Oct. 5-7. The John Battelle/O’Reilly production will be my last chance to try to keep up with this ever-fermenting industry before I go into deep-retreat mode and attempt to finish my book. (Except I’ll have to emerge some time in November, because that’s when Salon is planning special, not-yet-announced but stay-tuned-for-more, 10th-anniversary festivities!)

Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh

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I attended neither the Foo camp (not invited, that’s ok!) nor the Bar camp (loved the idea, maybe next year?). Hey, every weekend is camp in a household with two five-year-old boys! But I did learn a lot about the notion of the self-organizing conference space that both these events built upon from this post over on Martin Fowler’s site.

Apparently there’s a methodology and a history to this approach, summarized in a 1997 book by Harrison Owen.

This approach seems to make sense for almost any event that aims to move away from the yawn-inducing broadcast-style conference — speakers on stage, audience on hands, interesting stuff in the hallway — toward a true live-event manifestation of the many-to-many model that a lot of people are now embracing online.
[headline courtesy Allan Sherman]

Of maps and Mountain Goats

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Before our holiday weekend begins, a tip of the hat to two recent good experiences:

(1) On Wednesday morning I went off to the O’Reilly “Where 2.0″ conference, which was all about the new world of digital mapping and the mobile technologies and applications built upon them. That stuff is all well and good, but as a map geek from early childhood I was most excited by hearing the keynote from David Rumsey, a cartographic historian and collector of historical maps whose talks I’d heard superlative things about in the past. Rumsey did not disappoint. He put the current frenzy of excitement in stuff like Google Maps into a four-century perspective of the human quest to create maps that are not only useful and accurate but beautiful and meaningful. Then he showed us some simply astonishing techniques by which old maps can first be precisely positioned as overlays to contemporary digital satellite imagery, then transformed into 3D screenscapes — allowing, for instance, a fly-through of San Francisco as it looked a century ago.

As soon as I am off my authorial treadmill (only, aagh, two dozen more books about software to read!) I am sitting down with Rumsey’s book, Cartographica Extraordinaire, for a nice, long journey through time. (If you haven’t visited it already, Rumsey’s Web site is a jaw-droppingly amazing collection of historical maps.)

(2) Last Friday, fresh off the plane from New York, I high-tailed it over to the Bottom of the Hill for my second-ever experience of a Mountain Goats show. I’ve already logged my enthusiasm for the new Sunset Tree album from John Darnielle and his collaborators. It takes a lot, at my advanced mid-40s age, to get me to stand in a dim club until midnight to listen to somebody else’s music. (My five-year-olds will wake me at 6 a.m. regardless, so it’s a self-sentence of sleep deficit.) It was, in this case, utterly worthwhile.

What amazed me was that the set of maybe two dozen plus songs, which featured one catchy, clever, moving song after another, barely overlapped with the equally great set I heard from the Mountain Goats last year at the same venue. The two shows shared, at most, three songs. I can’t think of another artist (except for, you know, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, guys who are, uh, way older than Darnielle) who’s got both the back-catalog depth to pull that off and the will to actually do it, instead of playing the same handful of fan favorites over and over until both band and audience are bored with them. And I got to hear Darnielle play the song that first turned me on to his music, the rollicking downer “Palmcorder Yajna,” with a drummer borrowed from the band that preceded the Goats, and their producer, John Vanderslice, adding a second guitar and harmonizing at the mike on the chorus.

Darnielle established his reputation by recording songs solo on a boombox, accompanied only by a persistent capstan hiss. More often, these days, the Goats play as a duo (Darnielle and bassist Peter Hughes). But for a couple minutes last Friday, they looked like a rock ‘n’ roll band — and like, for those couple minutes, nothing else in the world was quite as much fun.