I was zoned out for the first keynote of the morning - not enough coffee to pay attention :) I'm coming around now that Gillmor is up (looks like he's moving his blog here soon). Heh - he's riffed the political slogan "It's the economy, stupid" into "It's the Gestures, stupid". Sounds like a key point of his talk is to get a simple point across: The user community is in charge and can no longer be effectively "talked at". There was a lot of talk about that yesterday, as well.

This goes back to attention.xml (something I've been ignoring, truth be told), which is a technology format that can be used to track what it is that you are paying attention to. Maybe I should look at it - I've had people ask for that kind of personal (not necessarily shared) information gathering in BottomFeeder, as a way of helping filter what they actually read as opposed to what they subscribe to.

Seems that some of the talk at last night's VC discussion, about business models that the VC's (here) don't believe in, has been the subject of some banter on the Gillmor Gang podcasts. I haven't been paying attention to those either, so I can't really express much of an opinion on that. I can say that I've been skeptical about Steve's gesture ideas though - see here, for instance. I spoke to Steve yesterday, and it sounds to me like he's thinking in public, and engaged in throwing ideas at the wall in public - so a lot of what he's writing about is forward looking cogitation. I'm still skeptical, but then again, so is he.

One thing he's got right is that there is a huge information glut. There are tons of sources for information, and current search engines return results based on a rough measure of relevance - pagerank/link results. Confusion over how that works was how WKPA got itself in trouble with their recent blog problem, for instance. Heck, whenever I need to link to that, I hit Google and take the second result - which is the Maine blogger they wrestled with. In a small way, I'm helping push the relevance of that result up.

"We are in a post search world" - the quality of what comes back from search results is questionable, from Steve's viewpoint. We are in the process of creating communities (Mike Arrington being an example of a self created publishing "somebody"). What Steve is looking for is this: RSS has transformed publishing, allowing people to subscribe to what they want, when they want it - but what's next, as a way of managing that? How do you "gesture" to the cloud and ask it to give you what you want? Gmail is a small scale version of that cloud (but in an email specific silo). What Steve wants is a mechanism better than current search that will find what you want and subscribe to it. Feed Discovery, if you will, but not limited to the page you happen to be looking at.

He's asking for smart use of history tracking in your browser. Google is doing this on a large scale, according to Steve. What he wants is a personal implementation that is aware of what you look at, and can then make sense of your future requests for "more like that" - sounds a lot like Amazon's "people who bought the book you are looking at also bought these other ones - would you like them too?" Google has something like that, in "find similar pages" - I don't think I've ever used that option though, so I have no idea how useful it is.

Question - are Techmeme (Digg, Reddit, etc) examples of this? Steve claims that techmeme isn't, as it's specifically what the site owner thinks is worthy of attention. Digg (and the others like it) are community based though. Heh - Steve doesn't pull punches either. He called the guy on the panel yesterday (Davidson) who was against full text feeds a pinhead who didn't realize that the truck was already half over him. Steve thinks that ad supported full text feeds are inevitable. There's a combination possible here - mass customization, offering relevant ads to people based on what their actual interests are.

Steve thinks that we'll get into a real lead generation economy. Hmm - sounds like personally selected middle men. No idea how that would work, but there's certainly no infrastructure for that now. He's pointing to GestureBank, which is building up that data. I'd be very curious to see what the response would be to a Google sponsored effort of this sort. Would people freak out over privacy concerns? That would be interesting to see. Steve thinks the revenue model should involve payment back to the people sharing gestures - and I think that's the part that breaks down right now. There's simply no convenient micropayment system around yet.