TRANSPARENT BUNDLES by Seth Goldstein

Wall Street 2.0?

 

Tom Glocer,  CEO of Reuters, stands in front of  Media Futures at the Open Data Conference in NY

And so, what does exhibitionism have to do with Wall Street? How does the voyueristic behavior of 20-somethings relate to the commission decisions of hedge fund masters of the universe? Traditionally, very little. Or at least we weren't aware of these connections.  Now, however, the advent of personal surveillance technologies has begun to popularize processes that up until now have been unavailable to individuals.

This resonates with a comment that Reuters CEO Tom Glocer made at the Open Data Conference.  It was the night before the conference, over dinner, that Glocer gave his perspective on the evolution of "open data" in the context of financial services. 

He told a story about the transformation of individual data points into market data.  Surprisingly, he didn't start with a traditional financial services firm, like Reuters, but rather with an individual Schwab customer. This retail trader, by virtue of her decision as to what to buy or sell and at what price, is the most granular actor in the price discovery machine.  As Glocer told the story, the online retail investor was the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in Hawaii causing hurricanes in China.  Her only action was to trade a stock in her 401K account online; but unbeknownst to her, Schwab took this trading data, along with that of all of the other individual retail investors, and established a higher level trend.  This process reverberated up through larger institutional brokers like Goldman Sachs and ultimately exchanges like the NYSE.   At each step up in aggregation and abstraction, significant economic value was extracted.  Although this individual's behavior is too volatile in and of itself to offer much in the way of trend analysis, this does not mean that her behavior is worthless.

This is the foundation of Wall Street 2.0:  the individual data producer is beginning to wake up to the economic value she is creating. This economic value had in the past been appropriated by those aggregating up the data from above.   Our electronic behavior, whether it be querying a search engine, clicking on an ad, checking out a stock, or trading a share, is generating value for other people that are in a position to aggregate and sell this information to institutions, who in turn transform it into some other form that ends up getting sold back to individuals.   Alchemy... to... Arbitrage.  This is nothing new.  What is new, however, is the extent to which our behavioral trails are no longer hidden, but are instead now available to us via various modes of personal Attention services, also known as myware.   This is the window that Open Data flows through:

Open data is to media what open source is to technology. Open data is an approach to content creation that explicitly recognizes the value of implicit user data. The internet is the first medium to give a voice to the attention that people pay to it. Successful open data companies listen for and amplify the rich data that their audiences produce.

Web Alchemy, Josh Harris & Justin.TV

Web Alchemy

Exactly two years ago, in April 2005, I wrote the first chapter on Alchemy in the Media Futures series.  Over the course of history, Alchemy always promised more than it could deliver.  But it was this promise that captured the imagination of people and drew their Attention to the very impossibility of turning “base metal into gold.”

As it relates to the contemporary Web landscape, Alchemy represents the promise of automatic personalized media creation.  It is the nuclear fission of intersecting Web 2.0 services.  "Maybe, just maybe, if I go to Web 2.0 Expo I will find that one service that that connects me most fully?"  This is the process of extreme triangulation that we- maybe without even knowing- are trying to achieve every moment that we use the Internet to express ourselves. The process is not new.  But its reception is.

When Josh Harris broadcast his life in real-time on weliveinpublic.org in 2000, it was received as strange exhibitionism in SoHo.  He and his girlfriend Tanya Corin went online in a Warhol art-house kind of way.  It wasn't clear what exactly Josh was trying to prove, but like many I was fascinated by the embedded cameras he installed in the Turkish-style bath. On Day 93, long after Tanya walked out and Josh had left it to brokers to sell the 4000 sf+ loft on lower Broadway, a recently arrived journalist who needed a place to crash ended up minding after the apt while it was being shown to potential buyers.  All the surveillance gear was very much in place and there was a working live control room where all the cameras flowed into, as well as the external chatter from those across the community grabbing these streams.  This writer describes what it was like to be there during these last days:

I am doing laundry all the next day, sitting alone, and I learn how to take advantage of the chatters. After all, I am a visitor in the house of a man I do not know. But they, they've lived here for a while... I ask them if Harris allows people to smoke in the loft. I ask if they know where an iron is. In one particularly surreal moment, I realize I have lost my keys. I enter the chat room and ask if anybody happens to see where I might have left them. One guy tells me to check my pockets. And there they were. From The Cyber House Rules By Will Leitch, Jan  1, 1999

Eight years ago when he wrote this, we had a different attitude towards pervasive surveillance than we have today.   Now, as American Idol, YouTube, Twitter and countless other social media phenomena would attest, the quickest road to celebrity is via one's willingness to become-  physically or behaviorally- naked.

And so, how then to describe the performance of Justin.TV?  His omnipresent camera cylinder to the left of his perspective is like the pen-above-the-ear of a great investigative journalist- Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein in All the Presidents Men.

Despite his camera, Justin doesn't care about coming off as a disinterested reporter.  There is no longer even a pretense that the subject drives the interview.  Maybe it's wrong to think of it as an interview at all.  The  recording instruments are so integrated and obvious that everybody Justin comes into contact with gets their own live studio audience.  This shifts the lens of narcissism from Justin to his audience, making him seem almost, well, selfless.

Michael Goldhaber recently defined a "star" as:

(When an attent typically has many audients, thus taking in more net attention than paying out, that person is of course a STAR.  )

On the Internet, this is based in large part on one's ability to express oneself openly, across multiple networks.  For example, in addition to the live video feed and community chat, Justin makes it easy for us to connect to him via shared social networks:

Justin wants people to pay close Attention to his stream and comment on his blog. This is exactly how stars enrapture their fans:  engaging them in production of the very stardom they wish to worship.  There is a significant difference between celebrity in the first Internet cycle and now.  It is not the tools that matter, since many of them have not changed dramatically, but a growing responsibility that more and more of us feel to express our unique, authentic selves online. Justin.TV, like Tia Tequila of MySpace, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Mark Zukerberg of Facebook and Fred Wilson of Typepad, inspire us to be all that we can be online- to open up our API and let the data flow.   

This is the Summer of Love, 40 years later transposed onto the Web.

 

Media Futures 2007: 4/5, Alchemy: History

The History of Alchemy

Practiced in civilizations across the world from ancient times up through the 19th century, the early proto-scientific and philosophical discipline of alchemy is most widely understood as the quest to achieve the transmutation of base metals into the precious metals of gold or silver, as well as the creation of a panacea, which promised to cure all disease, rendering immortality a fate not only reserved for the gods. Taking the commonality of properties of the known metals (gold, silver, iron, copper, tin, lead and mercury) as evidence of a commonality of composition, alchemists operated on the assumption that they might somehow correct the composition of the base metal, rendering it pure gold. To do so, they needed the philosopher’s stone, or the elixir, which would speed up that process of transmutation which, occurring naturally underground, would require the passage of thousands of years.

We might imagine the history of alchemy as a curious double-helix, its Eastern and Western strands decidedly separate but linked by certain commonalities. The Eastern strand of the history of alchemy finds its root in China, where alchemy was closely linked with the pursuit of health through traditional Taoist forms of medicine (specifically Acupuncture and Moxibustion, a therapy that uses mugwort herb to stimulate the circulation of blood through warm regions of the body and key acupuncture points). In that it was not so much concerned with the transmutation of base metals to previous metals, Chinese alchemy stood apart from its Western cousin, but it had its own version of the Philosopher’s Stone, which they called the Grand Elixir of Immortality.

But it is Egypt that promises to remain immortal when it comes to the discussion of the history of alchemy, its position of privilege perhaps embedded in the word alchemy itself. The etymology of the word is contested, traced to the Arabic al-kīmiya or al-khīmiya, meaning “cast together”, “pour together” or “weld”, as well as to the Persian Kimia, meaning “gold.” Others, though, read al- kīmiya as “the Egyptian [science]”, having been borrowed from the Copic word for “Egypt”, or kēme, which is itself derived from a chain that leads back to the ancient Egyptian term for the color black and the country of Egypt itself, kmt.

It is the god Thoth (also referred to as Hermes-Thoth) to whom mythology attributes the honor of being the founder of Egyptian mythology. It his forty-two Books of Knowledge, Thoth wrote in part on alchemy, but it is his Emerald Tablet, preserved Greek and Arabic translations, that is said to form a critical foundation in the alchemy of the West. Like Thoth’s Emerald Tablet, the only works of Egyptian alchemy available today have survived through such Greek and Arabic translations. As the Macedonians conquered Egypt in the 4th century, so came Greek language and culture in tow – and any Egyptian writings on alchemical philosophy and practice were likely burned as a part of Diocletian’s attempts to suppress a 292 revolt in Alexandria, that center of knowledge which figured so prominently in our histories of Automata and Algorithm.

There in Alexandria, the Greeks brought their philosophies of Pythagoreanism, Ionianism and Gnosticism together with the Egyptian hermetic philosophy, the principle tenet of which is called the macrocosm-microcosm belief: “in truth certainly and without doubt, whatever is below is like that which is above, and whatever is above is like that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of one thing.” That central belief, that the exterior world, or the macrocosm, affects the human body, or the microcosm, interacted with the belief that numbers rule the universe, that the universe could be explained by examining natural phenomena and that the world was created in a flawed manner, thereby rendering it imperfect (Pythagoreanism, Ionianism and Gnosticism, respectively, and grossly oversimplified) to create a tradition that left us with the idea that everything in the universe was formed from the elements earth, air, water and fire.

As the Greeks adopted Egyptian alchemical knowledge and traditions, so adopted the Romans the knowledge and traditions of the Greeks. But Christianity then swept through the empire, bringing Christian philosophies, and particularly those of Augustine, into contention with Hermetic ideals. Augustine believed experimental philosophy to be evil and ungodly, maintaining people could understand God through reason and faith. Augustine’s philosophies were in turn used to argue that alchemy was evil and ungodly. But alchemy already had its niche in the Christian tradition, grandfathered in by Greek and Roman culture. As medieval Europe saw Christian philosophers challenge Augustinian doctrine, its alchemists worked from the contributions from the Islamic world, which became the premier stage for scientific and alchemical development after the fall of Rome.

Islamic alchemists were responsible for the technique of distillation; they discovered sulfuric, hydrochloric and nitric acids – and, perhaps most importantly, that the latter two could be mixed together and used to dissolve gold, the noblest of metals. The philosopher Jabir Ibn Hayyan, referred to in English as Geber, remains one of the most influential writers in the history of alchemy, for it was he who sought after the artificial creation of life in the laboratory. He described the elements in terms of their hotness, coldness, dryness and moistness – qualities which could be altered in the laboratory and rearranged, thus resulting in a new metal. He thus introduced the search for the philosopher’s stone, a central thrust of the Western alchemical tradition.

Though many philosophized about alchemy in the early stages of the millennium, some historians argue that the first alchemical experimentation in medieval Europe did not occur until the 13th century, when Roger Bacon is said to have brought on the search for the elixir of life. Bacon’s contributions to science were widespread: in addition to his work in alchemy, he analyzed convex glasses and lenses, invented spectacles, theorized about the telescope and, lest we forget, created the talking head automaton.

Bacon’s European contemporaries were to a great extent members of the clergy, those who had access to and the education to read the world’s assembled alchemical oeuvre. As the 13th century drew to a close, there was an established architecture of alchemical belief, including the aforementioned macrocosm-microcosm theories, the four elements and the four qualities. But most importantly, these Christian alchemists believed that their art could reunite man and God – for if man’s soul had been divided with Adam’s fall, so could the separate parts be purified and brought together again. These philosophies would be struck down in the next century, with the edict of Pope John XXII against alchemy removing clergymen from its practice.

The alchemy of the next three hundred years was thus one of a much different character. Alchemists returned their efforts to the search for the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of youth, and influential figures like Nicolas Flamel and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa contributed to a major shift in the classification of the art – namely, alchemy went from being characterized as a mystical philosophy to that of an occultist magic. This shift set alchemy up to be struck down by the thinkers of the Age of Reason, who favored rigorous experimentation over such seeds of ancient wisdom. The prescient Paracelsus, perhaps the most important alchemist during the Renaissance, had perceived the occultist label a threat to the alchemical arts as a whole, and as such, he pushed back, casting some occultist threads and Gnostic philosophies out of his alchemical fabric, choosing to focus his efforts on using chemicals and minerals in medicine to achieve a healthy balance in human bodies. But the work of Paracelsus could still not overcome all that occultist image carried with it, all the fallout created by the charlatans and cons who promised transmutation but produced trash.

We might read the intentions of the earliest alchemists as the same as those of the Internet alchemists of today: above all else, the these alchemists concern themselves with the study of changes in the material world and how they might be able to harness the power of these changes for their own purpose and benefit. These solitary materials scientists, mixing various elements together to render their combinations far more valuable than the sums of their parts, set the stage for the Internet alchemists of today, who, in harnessing the power of the changes of Internet media and create entities which are far more valuable. This alchemy takes place in large part in the act of naming – a company, an index, a domain, a category, a database class – for in that move to name, the Internet alchemist creates something far more than simply a representation of some external object or idea.

Thanks to Maggie Dillon for helping with this research

Media Futures 2007: 4/5, Alchemy: Brecht 2.0

My encounter last month with Valleywag over avant garde playright and director Brecht resonated enough in the blogosphere so as to make this site the top result now for the query "seth brecht" or "brecht seth." And so thanks to some kind Attention alchemy, I have become an authority on the subject of Brecht (at least among Seths) in the eyes of the great Pagerank algorithm.

While this doesn't belong up there with Soros' "Real Time Experiment" in the Alchemy of Finance as an example of market manipulation, it  show how one can etch oneself into the way that Google resolves your queries- by using a popular blog to link to you in a certain context, and by routing many of its readers along for the collective experience of you.  Soros explains the reflexivity of markets: the way one perceives a market can in fact impact the behavior of the market.  He made billions off of this insight.  The reflexivity of Attention markets is similarly based on the premise that one's perception of Attention influences its supply.

Before dismissing the sethbrecht as a random blog divet, maybe theater is a useful metaphor for understanding the evolution from API to Alchemy.  As you know, I have been trying to negotiate the transition for a number of months.  I was focused on tracing the pure conversion of our automatic data algorithms into Attention streams, but I was having a difficult time describing how our unique streams collide- other than simply calling it Alchemy.

A few months ago I asked Goldhaber how his book on Attention was coming along.  He perked up and said that he had a new title for it, All the world's a stage: the emerging attention economy and how it distinctly differs from the economies of industry, markets and money that we are used to. Maybe this meant that understanding electronic Attention had something more fundamental to do with theater.  Since I studied dramatic literature in college, this was not so foreign to me.  The hallmark of modern theatre's avant garde (Meyerhold, Pirandello, Brecht, et al) was the participation of the viewer in the mode of theatrical production. Take, for example, Brecht's Lehrstucke (learning plays) from the 1920's. According to Wikipedia,

Brecht described them (Lehrstucke) as "a collective political meeting" in which the audience is to participate actively. One sees in this model a rejection of the concept of the bureaucratic elite party where the politicians are to issue directives and control the behaviour of the masses...

We can look at this audience as active participant model as an early prototype for contemporary social media. In the theater of the avant garde, the writer, director and actors all attempted to directly engage the behavior of the audience.  Brecht's infamous alienation effect was simply a feature set and interface that reminded the audience (aka user) that he was not to get lost in the experience of the media but instead needed to participate in changing it:

For this purpose, Brecht employed the use of techniques that remind the spectator that the play is a representation of reality and not reality itself, which he called the Verfremdungseffekt (translated as distancing effect, estrangement effect, or alienation effect). Such techniques included the direct address by actors to the audience, transposition of text to third person or past tense, speaking the stage direction out loud, exaggerated, unnatural stage lighting, the use of song, and explanatory placards. By highlighting the constructed nature of the theatrical event, Brecht hoped to communicate that the audience's reality was, in fact a construction and, as such, was changeable.  from Wikipedia Entry on Brecht

This experience of being on stage, and using the stage as a means of changing user behavior, is something that is personal to me.  I remember when I was 14 years old performing on the stage at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.

It was a bitter February evening during the week and I was standing on the stage dressed like an Italian kid fresh off of Ellis Island, with stiff-heeled shoes, an annoying beret and lots of make-up.  The play was Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, adapted by Robert Brustein. I was standing on stage behind my mother, played by sitcom Alice's Linda Lavin, looking out at the audience, watching them watch me. On the stage behind me was most of the actual ART resident acting group, behaving as if they were in the midst of rehearsals for Gozzi's King Stag, which was in fact being directed then by Andrei Serban. They started the performance all smiles and inside jokes until the door at the back of the theatre opened up and so appeared a family of actors, including me as the youngest son, searching for our author ("any author will do...") who might finish our play.

One of the best descriptions of pure theater that I have come across is by the famous Polish experimental director Jerzy Grotowski. More than anybody, Grotowski was the prototypical green, organic metaphysician of the stage.  He fled communist Poland after WWII, invigorated the downtown NY avant garde scene in the late 60's, taught theory at UC Irvine in the 80's, and ended up practicing what he preached on a remote Italian island before he died a few years ago.  In his classic text, Towards a Poor Theatre, from 1968, Grotowski writes:

By gradually eliminating whatever proved superfluous, we found that theatre can exist without make-up, without autonomic costume and scenography, without a separate performance area (stage), without lighting and sound effects, etc. It cannot exist without the spectator relationship of perceptual, direct, communion….

This "relationship of perceptual, direct, communion" is very close to what I am trying to express with the notion of the readerverse- a place or moment where the reader and writer are both fully engaged in the cooperative process of creating something original (ie Alchemy) by virtue of the  unique, real-time data streams that they surface to eachother.  For a while I struggled to come up with a real-world object that best emblematized the readerverse: a mirror? a shadow? a trail we leave behind? But now I am fairly sure that the readerverse is best expressed as a stage, where we create social media with a sequence of clicks and tags and queries.

And so here we are, beginning to realize that by virtue of paying Attention in the same electronic theatre, that we are creating some strange performance for eachother, by eachother, with eachother.  This is the primal social media expression, one that despite its rough amateur mechanics nevertheless promises a profound shift in the way media is created.  I defer to Steve Gillmor, whose silence about the imminent integration of the Gesture Bank and the AttentionTrust Extension, belies a remarkably prescient insight he had almost two years ago:

What does matter is a pool of attention metadata owned by the users. This open cloud of reputational presence and authority can be mined by each group of constituents. Users can barter their attention in return for access to full content, membership priviliges, and incentives for strategic content... And the media, which now includes publishers, analysts, researches, rating services, advertisers, sponsors, and underwriters, can use the data as a giant inference engine... With so much going for it, how and where is attention vulnerable? It’s vulnerable to being pigeonholed as an automated artificially intelligent approach to personalization. In my view... attention metadata is useful in service of the reputational filter of the people and ideas I and the people I track are interested in. This is not about merely reorganizing my feed data based on my patterns of acquisition, but the cumulative weighting of the minds and interests represented by those feeds and items.  Steve Gillmor, Waiting for Attention, March 2005

Welcome to the Readerverse

I always loved you

You always had a lot of style

I'd hate to see you on the pile Of ‘nearly-made-it' s

You've got the essence, dear

If I could have a second skin

I'd probably dress up in you

Belle & Sebastian, The Life Pursuit

Welcome to the readerverse. Just as pages and sites have their community in Ted Nelson's concept of the docuverse, so users and visitors have theirs in the readerverse. It is a place where responses are generated as the primary activity. This occurs when we are reading, browsing, searching, scanning, tuning into, subscribing and, generally, using the Internet passively, automatically. The readerverse shadows the more explicit actions of writing, commenting, rating, taging and coding.

Via my various widget logs, I have been trying to illuminate my own readerverse.  I write things and then listen for the barely audible click steps that you make when you visit; the slight pinging sound you make when your reader checks my RSS feed.  With some of the emerging blog statistics and Attention tracking services that are emerging, the web is increasingly rendering as visible what we have come to think of as invisible.

One way of thinking about this in the real-world would be imagine what it would be like if your gaze left a mark? What if when you looked at somebody, instead of that being your private experience, that the person  immediately felt that she was being watched by you? How would that change the way we behave? We feel free to watch certain things, listen to certain conversations, tune in to certain channels, without worrying about these Attention choices being exposed to others.

This is a fundamental media right: the preference we enjoy in knowing that our media choices (ie our decisions about what we choose to pay Attention to) are not only under our control but are private to us. Bishop Berkeley asked whether the tree really falls if nobody is there to observe it.  This applies to the physics of Attention. If my gaze is imperceptible to those I am paying Attention to, then I remain the  sole source of information on my media consumption habits. However, if my gaze has material properties that impact others, then there are by definition other sources of authority on my Attention data. 

Almost seventy years ago, Alan Turing,   the brilliant British computer scientist and war-time cryptographer, suggested that:

The behaviour of the computer at any moment is determined by the symbols which he is observing, and his "state of mind" at that moment. Turing, On Computable Numbers, 1938

Now isn't that interesting? A conception of computing, from 1938 no less, in which the computer's behavior is driven by the Attention it is paying.  Putting this in the context of Goldhaber's theory of the physics of Attention will lead us to important laws on how influence is created:

There is only so much attention (available from other humans), and many or most of us want more than we have.

In order to get attention one needs to express or do something — let us say, perform in some way. (This can be putting forth information, but that is not particularly what, e.g., a trapeze artist does.)

The more attention we get in comparison with the attention we pay in putting together our total performance, the greater our attention productivity.

The more attention we have, period, the more influential we are.

The more attention you get now, or have gotten in the past, the more attention you can get in the future. (Attention wealth is stored in the minds of the attention payers.)

Having others’ attention means you can rely on some attentiveness from them as well. Attentiveness is a willingness to satisfy your desires whatever they may be — as long as these desires do not go too much against what the attention payers (audients) would otherwise want.

Though all this has always been true, new attention technologies, and particularly the Internet, make all this work much more directly. They make it easy for more of us to seek attention, and if and when we get it, to have other desires satisfied as well.

Michael Goldhaber, February 2007

Valleywag is Intimate Attention

The most valuable form of attention is that which you are most reluctant to part with.

This is what you do, privately, that you dont wish to share with anybody else, including your friends, family and maybe even your spouse.  Oftentimes we are even willing to pay subscription fees for content that we wish to consume in complete confidence.     Perhaps this is because we intuit that ad-supported media has a way of capturing information about our attention that we don't wish to share.

A few weeks ago my friend Scott Heiferman of meetup.com came by to visit on the eve of a board meeting in SF.   I was astounded at the hundreds of thousands of live, real-life group meet-ups he has facilicated from a simple software platform.  Scott has always been a champion of expressing yourself on the Internet, from his first days at iTraffic when he taught his clients how to market links to their own web sites.   Before search engine optimization and marketing, remember, the primary traffic generators were banners.  A few years ago he became fascinated with the idea of putting pictures online, even before flickr shifted their focus from mmorgs to images.   So Scott started a company called Fotolog, which is one one of the most popular Spanish-language sites in the world (even if it is driven by intense social media consumption in Brazil).

Over dinner, Scott said that he had swore off mail and rss clients, and had gone entirely to the Web, courtesy of Google.  I asked him if he had seen what Google was now offering to users of its reader product, in terms of helping them understand which feeds they were paying the most Attention to.  No surprise that I believe that the socialization of Attention data will usher in the next great wave of innovation online; and I shared my enthusiasm with Scott about a world where people were able to (selectively) expose various aspects of their online behavior to others that they trust.  I encouraged Scott to log in to his Google Reader account so he could see what i meant.    He paused for a moment, obviously not willing to share this level of intimacy with me and said:

"You know Seth, I would be embarassed for you to know how much time i spend each day reading Valleywag.”

It was only fitting, then, that I got Valleywagged last week for wading too deep in theory: late Monday night I ruminated over how the identity of a blogger essentially becomes the clicks that lead to the blog ("products of environment" in the always clarifying words of Yardley.ca) and then Tuesday morning I awake to see a rash of new incoming clicks from Valleywag.  Valleywag c'est moi.  Not quite sure what to make of the Transparent Bundles - Valleywag mashup.  Reminds me of when Brecht traveled to Hollywood to write screenplays...

At the First Round Capital dinner at Bibibbo in Menlo Park, I ran into Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed Ventures who leaned over and apologized for not understanding what I was talking about in my last post.  And so there I was, after a day of absorbing Michael Arrington’s perfect pitch lunch address; Fox’s Heather Hardee establish a modicum of  diplomacy with 3rd party widget networks on MySpace; and Google’s Chris Sacca remind us that there is no better place to find meaning in your work than inside of their work; than I was reminded to start making sense.

“Cookies are worth dimes, but profiles are worth dollars”

Scott Rafer’s performance at Web 2.0 in October, where he pitched 10+ Yahoo! execs in a row, may forever cast him as the Paul Revere of this pending revolution:  “Attention is coming... attention is coming!”   This was a transformative event, if only because it put an real value (ie $10+ million) on otherwise invisible data about people reading blogs.   Sure, we have recognized the economic value of explicit social media- user generated videos (ie YouTube), tags (ie del.icio.us) and photos (ie flickr); but this was the first time that the implicit, behavioral contributions of users were valued as an asset.

Eric and Todd started MyBlogLog as a stats package, which dropped a cookie on each reader so as to report better stats back to the writer of the blog.   As blogs have taken off, MBL was able to drop more and more cookies on the machines of users that it otherwise had no relationship with.   This “worthless traffic” of readers would have remained such if it were not for a unique insight by Rafer.   His contribution, having no doubt listened to one of the many sermons on Attention, was to see the cookie as a social media input.   Why not give readers of blogs the opportunity to express their readership to the writers they visit?  In other words, why not enable users to connect their anonymous implicit cookies to their personal explicit profiles?

This was a simple enough proposition but amounts, in my mind, to something new and important:  the reader as activist.  Offering little more than the ability to have your icon appear on the blogs that you visit, MBL turned the cookie from something that exposes you to something that expresses you.    What had always been limited to passive behavioral data for publishers and advertisers to target against had now become something different- a continuous stream of active Attention gestures.    As Scott recounted, “They [Eric and Todd] were gathering implicit data before I got there.  We added explicit, public rendering of that implicit data."

Yahoo!’s decision to purchase MBL makes sense as a means of converting some of their 150+ million  “worthless” page views into opt-in Attention profiles.  Already, groups are starting to form within the MBL communities that recognize their own opportunity to “vote with their feet” which in this case would be more akin to marketing through their clicks.   For example, just think of small groups of members, organized around a cause or particular passion, descending en masse upon a site.  The widget expressing the last 10 readers suddenly becomes a powerful tool for asserting a certain position.  First comes the inane home town fans click-pack with each user wearing a Cincinnatti Reds baseball hat in the picture on his profile; then come the more interesting political agendas and petitions.

One thing is for sure- behavioral targeting companies such as Tacoda, Revenue Science and Blue Lithium have no choice but to align themselves with the user in control.  In the wake of MBL/Yahoo!, these behavioral networks can no longer sell advertising through publishers without giving some real functional or economic benefit back to the the users creating the behavior to begin with.    And because these networks dont have a profile-based relationship with their audience, they have to start from scratch.

Please allow me to introduce myself

Im a man of wealth and taste

Ive been around for a long, long year

Stole many a mans soul and faith...

Pleased to meet you

Hope you guess my name 

Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil

Enabling readers to express their unique identities with minimal transaction costs is what the best social media services are able to achieve.  The vast majority, however, fall on either side of this:  either they are too sheepish to let their users know how much they really know about them, or they are too presumptuous and excite privacy hysteria.  One young entrepreneur who has been building fair-trade Attention services put it best when he said:

I've often wondered if and when users will become aware of the value their data holds, and whether they'll demand ownership of it, or simply throw a fit that such data is being mined.

Audients

I have not written anything on this blog in over a month. It bothers me not to write for such long periods of time, since I know that my influence expands and contracts based on on how often I post. Relationships require frequency of contact to flourish, whether they be personal or business oriented; and the relationship between me as the author and you as the reader is no different.

I am usually mindful of this. Like perhaps many bloggers, I start my own web browsing experience with a number of tabs tuned into my stats from Typepad, Feedburner, Measure Map and others. It is a form of self identification, trying to understand who is paying Attention to me in terms of how many people end up on my page and how they get here- was it a reference to me from somebody else’s blog or was it a search engine query that surfaced one of my prior posts above the algorithmic fold?

In fact, I know relatively little about you. Maybe you subscribe to me through my feedburner API, or else you might show a little cookie to one of my widgets, but I still don’t really get a clear sense of who you are in any personal, dynamic, emotional way. Email introductions are more connected since you reveal yourself as an individual with your own voice. Once in a while I might even run into you at a meeting in person and you will tell me that you are a long-time reader of my blog. These are some but not all of the various ways that you express your presence to me as an active reader. By active I simply mean that you are telling me directly that you are paying Attention to the information I am producing.

The combination of ways that I experience your Attention has created a new upper register of consciousness.  It is filled with audients: people like yourself who are tuning into my output and for whom I feel a certain sense of responsibility. It is exceedingly hard to talk of you as a coherent group. What do you who landed here from a Wikipedia article on Wall Street soft dollars have in common with you who saw a reference to me in Fred Wilson’s blog, other than the fact that you are both reading this page? So instead of thinking of you as a single figure in the foreground, it is as if you are a constant murmer of feedback behind me- watching me, no matter what I might be doing, but unavailable to me no matter how much I might want to pay Attention to you.

The opportunity to understand the behavior of readers and feed this back to publishers is driving significant product innovation. The most recent example is MyBlogLog which was purchased by Yahoo! before it had a chance to demonstrate its viability as a stand-alone product, much less as a independent business. Lately, tools like this for understanding the (implicit) Attention of readers are improving even faster than those for expressing (explicit) personal information of publishers such as blogging, tagging and rating services.

As I am able to access increasingly fine-grained information about the nature of my audience, the way in which I express myself here on these pages begins to reflect that understanding.  It is no longer so simple as writing about something and then waiting for people to show up who are interested in the subject of the post.  Now, many of you often show up in advance, announcing your interests immediately.  If I dont satisfy your expectations for certain insights while I have your Attention, then I will lose it to others sources.  Without your Attention, the writing likely stops.  And without the writing, so goes this blog which is a big part of my online identity.

One way of putting it, then, is that the stability of my identity is tied to having access to your Attention statistics.

Media Futures 2006: 3/5, API: Natural Expression from 1440 Gutenberg to 2006 Web Services

APIs are the printing presses of social media.  Like Gutenberg's machines, APIs are uninteresting in and of themselves, but absolutely essential for the transmission of important ideas between people.   We learn about APIs by paying attention to what exists on either side of them:  Who is the sender? Who is the receiver? What is being communicated?   As we answer these questions, we endow the API with meaning. Over time, some APIs become more than just generic transport mechanisms; some become destinations in their own right.  For example, the Flickr API is one such case, where its proximity to interesting data streams seems to have emboldened its management to claim interestingness as their own invention . My original goal for introducing the API as one of the five elements of Media Futures was to emphasize its function as the natural transport mechanism through which human data streams turn into money.

... establish the API as a key component of media futures, specifically as the hinge between the algorithm that processes raw human meta data and the moment of alchemy that occurs when you discover something you didn't even know you were looking for, courtesy of some people that you didn't even know that you knew.  Media Futures 2005:  API

It is difficult to talk directly about APIs since their value is based  on their role as vessels for the movement of data between people.  Perhaps in order to describe an API, therefore, one needs to use language similar to that used in describing global currencies or financial instruments- price, liquidity and volatility.  We want to know the value of the data moving across boundaries, how robust the stream is, and how frequently it changes in any significant way.  And so as I license access to an API, what I am really doing is entering into a contract to take delivery of information in the future.  I call  the server, with the expectation of receiving a certain type of information in a certain format.  My hunch is that this information, so delivered, is going to attract the attention of others more so than I might have with my own internal data. The quick investment math I do, therefore, as a Web Services trader, is to gauge whether the cost (mostly technical and opportunity, sometimes financial) of accessing a particular stream is less than the incremental value it will add to my social media application on a go-forward basis.  The instruments that I am trading are, of course, people.  And the way that I am able to distinguish one meta data belly from another is based on the richness and authenticity of the human data stream.  Just as there are different grades of Gold, or Corn, or Bonds for that matter, there are different qualities of "natural" human API streams.

We need to go back a bit, 50 years in fact, to trace back the history of social media computing (aka cybernetics) to a genuine concern for the natural expressivity of human beings.  In his 1954 book, the Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Weiner prefigures the radical support of user in control that we see today in the work of Steve Gillmor at AttentionTrust and Mitchell Baker at Mozilla.

It is my thesis that the operation of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel.  Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation:  that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine.  In both cases, these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead.  The information is then turned into a new form available for the further stages of performance.  ...our view of society differs from the ideal of society which is held by many Fascists, Strong Men in Business, and Government.  Similar men of ambition for power are not entirely unknown in scientific and educational institutions.  Such people prefer an organization in which all orders come from above, and none return.  The human beings under them have been reduced to the level of effectors for a supposedly higher nervous organism.  I wish to devote this book to a protest against this inhuman use of human beings; for in my mind, any use of a human being in which less is attributed to him than his full status is a degradation and a waste. Norbert Weiner, 1954, The Human Use of Human Beings

Herein lies the key to creating meaningful APIs:  attributing full status to the Internet user.   What does this status mean exactly for media companies in November 2006?  Mitchell Baker captures this  particularly well when she writes that:

Each individual is not just an exporter of raw data that others process to gain value out of and sell back to her, her place on the value chain is much higher.  She should be able to weave the data into a fabric that represents her value, and she should benefit from that value.

The act of weaving that Baker refers to is a classical gesture.  It invokes the same Greek Sieve that I  referred to a few months back in the discussion of Algorithm.  The gestures of social media, however, want to be consumed electronically so that they can spread without the usual gravity that keeps local physical gestures in their place.  The evolution from physical gestures to electronic gestures as it relates to the future history of APIs is the subject of the next and final essay on API, before we move on to Alchemy.

Media Futures 2006: 3/5, API: Introduction

API stands for Application Programming Interface.  In the context of Media Futures, an API routes the output from one's own unique Attention-processing Algorithm  into an Alchemical reaction triggered by the convergence of other human-driven APIs.

I wrote my first post about APIs in the Spring of 05, at a moment when APIs such as those of Flickr and del.icio.us were just starting to become becoming popular targets of developers.  Since then, the subject of APIs has become commonplace in any discussion of the future of media.  In fact AOL- that stalwart of old new media- is now obsessed with open APIs.  Tina calls it the “the liberation of egosystems.”  Open data transport has suddenly become de riguer among the even the most traditional media companies.  In less than two weeks, legions of their corporate development executives will descend upon SF to walk down the red carpet of the O’Reilly ceremony, ready to sign the top Web 2.0 talent to long-term studio deals.

But while we all fall over ourselves to proclaim our “openness,” we introduce a far heavier burden of trust into the mix.  Is one company’s “open” the same as another’s?  While I may be able to avoid data lock-in in that silo, how do i know for sure the next “open data” silo will be equally amenable to the mobility of my data?  These questions beg a deeper investigation into the history of APIs and their evolution both physically and electronically.

History

In a memorandum dated July 15, 1949, Warren Weaver, who held the position of director of the division of natural sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation from 1932 – 1955, wrote about the possibility of language translation by an electronic computer.  It was the first suggestion most had seen that such a thing might be possible, and as he draws the memorandum to a close, his words preview the emergence of the API:

Think, by analogy, of individuals living in a series of tall closed towers, all erected over a common foundation.  When they try to communicate with one another, they shout back and forth, each from his own closed tower.  It is difficult to make the sound penetrate even the nearest towers, and communication proceeds very poorly indeed.  But, when an individual goes down his tower, he finds himself in a great open basement, common to all the towers.  Here he establishes easy and useful communication with the persons who have also descended from their towers.

Thus may it be true that the way to translate from Chinese to Arabic, or from Russian to Portuguese, is not to attempt the direct route, shouting from tower to tower.  Perhaps the way is to descend, from each language, down to the common base of human communication – the real but as yet undiscovered universal language – and then re-emerge by whatever particular route is convenient.  Such a program involves a presumably tremendous amount of work in the logical structure of languages before one would be ready for any mechanization.

The key to examining the evolution of the role of the API in context of Media Futures lies, in fact, in the multiple resonances of its last term, Interface:  as a surface lying between two portions of matter or space, thus forming their common boundary; as a means or location of interaction between two systems or organizations; as an apparatus designed to connect two scientific instruments so that they can be operated jointly, the abstract concept of an interface contains in it the possibility of a very literal connection between two beings, two faces.  As a physical interface connects two pieces of hardware, a user interface connects a human and a computer and a software interface connects separate software components so that they may communicate with one another.  To interface is to come into interaction with a thing or being, to communicate, in manners both figurative and literal.

Mainframes

As a platform that allows a computer system, library or application to open itself to use by other computer programs, or to allow for the exchange of data between them, the APIs of yesterday were IBM mainframes and Microsoft SDKs, arcane languages of translation between hardware and software.

From the late 1950s through the 1970s, a number of American, German and British manufacturers (Burroughs, Control Data Corporation, General Electric, Honeywell, NCR, RCA and UNIVAC; Siemens and Telefunken; and ICL, respectively), produced such mainframes, computers used in large part by companies and government institutions for the purposes of bulk data processing in the context of, for example, the census or financial transaction processing.  IBM secured itself a position of power in the industry with the development of its 700/7000 series, based on vacuum tubes and transistors, and with its 360 series mainframe.  Unveiled in 1964, the 360 series was to be an all-around computer system, a series of compatible models for purposes both scientific and commercial – a series which, moreover, brought together features which were once only available in scientific or commercial computers, such as floating point arithmetic in the former and decimal arithmetic and byte addressing in the latter.  The 360 series also included supervisor and application mode programs and instructions and built-in memory protection facilities, making it one of the first computers manufactured with provisions specific to the use of an operating system.

Console of an IBM 360/67 mainframe

PCs

As the demand for the older mainframe systems fell off, new installations were seen mainly in the realms of finance and the government.  Personal computer networks came to challenge the mainframe.  It was during the rise of personal computing networks, though, that the APIs with which we are most familiar came into being and, in the case of Windows, achieved dominance. 

In 1975, the Altair 8800 was introduced in Popular Electronics, a personal computer that was affordable, user-friendly, and, some argue, the spark that set Apple Computer and Microsoft ablaze in their development of personal computers. The Apple II, though less capable and versatile than some of the larger computers of the day, gave computer enthusiasts an environment in which to develop their own programming skills and to operate simple office and productivity applications. 

The IBM PC released in 1981 took the personal computer into the realm of business, giving individual users word processing programs, spreadsheet programs and database programs which would change the way businesses stored, sorted and used their data. Four years later in 1985, in order to compete with the graphical user interfaces made popular by Apple, Microsoft released an add-on to MS-DOS – an operating environment known as Windows.

 

Though that release of Windows was not an operating system in the full sense of the term, it had pushed beyond the characteristics of a typical desktop, adopting some functions of operating systems.  Windows achieved a leg up on competing systems due in large part to the fact that MS-DOS dominated the early landscape of personal computing.  But the dominance of Windows (up until Google that is) is the API.  The APIs which enabled professional programmers to develop desktop applications on top of platforms (perhaps most notably the Microsoft Windows API), have now given way to APIs which feed off of the platform of the Internet.  And while Microsoft and the desktop are controlled by physical bodies, the Internet, despite the fact that certain companies do, in fact, oversee enormous pools of user data and have the ability to direct traffic as they see fit, is not governed by a particular body or set of bodies.  If the power flow of yesterday’s APIs was a vertical one, headed at top by the executives of companies like Microsoft, which allowed programmers to work off of their platform to develop applications to be used by the users at the  bottom, we might see the power flow of today’s APIs as closer to a horizontal one.   

Next:  The Thrilling Poverty of Physical Gestures

Spying on Transparency

1 Year of Attention

Exactly one year ago to the day, on October 4 2005, I wrote a joint post about the launch of ATX, the Attention Extension, which was the first open source clickstream recorder for the Firefox browser.  This was the culmination of a month of heavy lifting to produce the code and create the environment within which it would find an audience of the right people.  We were on our way to Web 2.0 conference, where we had a slot in the afternoon to host the first AttentionTrust board meeting, open to the public. 

Little has changed since then. 

And yet everything has changed.

365 Days: the People

I turned IAG, the Internet Arbitrage Group, into Root Markets and raised capital from a number of investors including Lewis Ranieri, The New York Times, Deutsche Bank and most recently, the Chicago Board of Trade.  I also began work on a clickstream Vault, which was set up as the first approved commercial service for ATX.  We released the Vault application to users last November, and since then have added a number of additional features such as the ability to exchange clickstream information with trusted people, evaluate your influence, and syndicate your clickstream through blogs.  The Vaults now have more than 50 million clicks under management on behalf of users.

Stan James, along with support from Mike Frumin, Tony Lieuallen and others, developed the code for ATX, followed his passion.  He moved to Boulder to turn his vision for Outfoxed into the business of Lijit Networks, with Brad Feld and I as his investors and board members and Todd Vernon as his operating CEO

Steve Gillmor claimed victory in the War for Attention and resigned from the board of AttentionTrust to focus his energies on collaborating with Robert Anderson on the architecture and implementation of GestureBank.

365 Days: the Companies

In addition to the narrative of the people involved with AttentionTrust over the past 12 months, there is an equally compelling story about the steps and missteps of companies impacted by the emerging Attention Economy.  Here is my brief history of key events over the past 12 months:

December 2005:  Del.icio.us sells its users’ tags to Yahoo! for $$$

March 2006:  O’Reilly ETech Attention Economy Conference

April 2006:  PC Forum Conference, Users in Control

July 2006:  Netscape pays Diggers for their gestures

August 2006:  Ray Ozzie say of Windows Live “we will monitor” our users

August 2006:  AOL Search Breach

September 2006:  HP Pretext Scandal

September 2006:  Facebook “Redesign” Fiasco

October 2006:    ?

AttentionGate, August 2006:  Defendant #1, AOL Search

In August, AOL Search broke the thin glass that separated Thelma Arnold’s personal search history from the rest of the world:  “Those Are My Searches”

From NY Times August 9:

Buried in a list of 20 million Web search queries collected by AOL and recently released on the Internet is user No. 4417749. The number was assigned by the company to protect the searcher's anonymity, but it was not much of a shield.

No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from ''numb fingers'' to ''60 single men'' to ''dog that urinates on everything.''

And search by search, click by click, the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern. There are queries for ''landscapers in Lilburn, Ga,'' several people with the last name Arnold and ''homes sold in shadow lake subdivision Gwinnett County Georgia.''

It did not take much investigating to follow that data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga., frequently researches her friends' medical ailments and loves her three dogs. ''Those are my searches,'' she said, after a reporter read part of the list to her

From NY Times August 22:

Nearly 20 million discrete search queries, representing the personal Internet hunting habits of more than 650,000 AOL customers gathered over a three-month period last spring, were posted by a company researcher, Abdur Chowdhury, on a publicly accessible Web site late last month.

No user names were attached to the query data, which was intended for use by search engine researchers in academia. But word of the data - which provided an intimate, sometimes disturbing look into what Americans search for on the Web - spread through the blog circuit and immediately began raising questions about the sort of privacy consumers were entitled to when they used search engines.

Within moments, amateur SQL hacks around the world had downloaded the 500mb .tar file and begun to extrapolate from the large pool of data thousands of unique individual streams of identity.  Insofar as it is unique and can express its lookingforness (ie search history) freely, an anonymous ID is imminently identifiable.  The expansion of social media across more and more online behavior means that it is increasingly likely that each one of your gestures will find a public outlet for expression.  The distinction between sanctioned and unsanctioned, public and private, open and closed will continue to erode because new forms of passive data expression increase every day.  This is the drama of anonymity, which is now a form of content in its own right.

This is precisely why we need to recognize and support the integration of Gesture Bank into AttentionTrust, which Steve Gillmor and Robert Anderson have gifted to our organization.  Thank you Steve.  Thank you Robert.  I am not sure anybody fully appreciates how important this will be to our future as free digital citizens. 

Attention the Media

Michael Goldhaber constantly reminds us that there is only so much Attention that we can pay.  And we have yet to promise all of our future Attention away.  Our future media commitments remain up for grabs, depending upon a variety of factors that have yet to be determined.  Because our choices as to what we pay Attention in the future remain contingent, there are great media territories still to be colonized.  This is why, with breathtaking speed, media and technology companies are competing in an arms race to conquer the Attention of their users.  The noble aims of Google, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and others are all based upon free market social media capitalism.  It assumes that people have free choice in the media technologies that they use.

In 2000, Josh Harris, the founder of Jupiter and Pseudo, pursued self surveillance as a form of media to its logical extreme.  His “weliveinpublic.org” was an open view into his  SoHo loft, with live cameras embedded in virtually every surface.  He and his girlfriend moved in, turned on the record button, and in a matter of months she had left him, and he was rumored to have purchased an abandoned apple orchard in upstate New York.  Right up to the end of his experiment; however, Josh kept pointing me to an animation that he created and was most proud of.  It featured an imaginary, 2nd Life -like landscape filled with dancing people who had TV’s instead of heads, and the TV’s were broadcasting their faces.  As these TV-headed people pranced around, they called out to the audience:  “let us show you how we show you how to live.”

Strange things happen when physical gestures turn into electronic signals.   Signals can be exchanged and valued, prompting intricate auction mechanisms that allow people to "trade" media.  The logic of trading is not governed by traditional media and advertising structures, but rather by the mercurial but ultimately efficient market dynamic.  But the broader “you” is missing in this transaction, outside of the fixed number of data fields that you fill out to indicate your interest in a commercial relationship. This is some strange math:  entirely focused on optimizing your response and yet structurally uninterested in anything you might have to say outside of narrowly defined response parameters.  Within these new markets enabled by Internet arbitrageurs and data brokers, there are billions of micro markets where a query or a unique user path comes into contact with one of more targeted advertisements. A tension emerges between the mission of the user who intends to find or do something and the sponsor of the link who, like a mercenary bounty hunter, is trying to lure the user into a proprietary commercial environment.

In 2000 I was at the TED conference in Monterey and had the opportunity to hear John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins talk about his experience working with entrepreneurs.  He said that there were two types, mercenaries and missionaries:

What distinguishes companies led by mercenaries from those led by missionaries? While the two might seem similar at first glance, they are in fact very different, Doerr points out. "Mercenaries are driven by paranoia; missionaries are driven by passion," he says. "Mercenaries think opportunistically; missionaries think strategically. Mercenaries go for the sprint; missionaries go for the marathon. Mercenaries focus on their competitors and financial statements; missionaries focus on their customers and value statements. Mercenaries are bosses of wolf packs; missionaries are mentors or coaches of teams. Mercenaries worry about entitlements; missionaries are obsessed with making a contribution. Mercenaries are motivated by the lust for making money; missionaries, while recognizing the importance of money, are fundamentally driven by the desire to make meaning."

This description has stayed with me over the years and has has become a core mental architecture.  Reflecting on this, I went back to my original post entitled Media Futures: from Theory to Practice from November of last year announcing the launch of ROOT as a lead exchange:

One final observation: the Internet business path is about to split.  One direction leads to an open approach to data, governed by the principles of transparency and publicity.  The other direction leads to a closed approach to data, focused on privacy and opacity: the black box.  Both directions have legitimate and consistent end-user benefits and economic rationales.  The danger is getting stuck in the middle:  (1) looking to increase your edge but not locking up the information it is based on; or (2) promoting your open-ness but not sharing data back to the system.

I believe this is even more the case now than when I wrote it last year.  There is no middle ground between the black box and the transparent bundle.  Most users are simply apathetic about the value of their attention data.  This apathy needs to stop.  Now.

There are too many parties out there who do not respect the four principles of AttentionTrust.  These folks, pardon my Algerian,  can go f--k their Attention-colonist selves.

Dear Mr. Search Engine, I regret to inform you that my search history is no longer your solution for a cleaner India...

Dear Mr. Behavioral Network, I regret to inform you that my clickstream is no longer your solution for civilizing the new world...

From now on, I will tell you and all of the companies behind you who are bidding for your inventory (aka my attention),  when and under what circumstances I am willing to expose myself.  My commitment to the principles of AttentionTrust threatens the practices and behaviors of any body who profits in-between me and those who desire my Attention. 

As users in control, we have a responsibility to lead the industry with vision, to grab the mercenaries by the scruffs of their necks and force them to recognize the missionary values we operate upon.

The more they take, the more we give
The more they steal, the more we share
The more they lie, the more we tell the truth
The more they spy, the more transparent we become