Giving Away Attention
[via Scripting] Gillmor challenges Microsoft to endorse free and open attention data interchange. He then asserts that Google would surely follow suit (if not lead the way), and Yahoo is just nervous. To me, this is as naive as Tim Berners-Lee currently going around saying that “the semantic web is finally happening”.
I want to believe it, and there are hopeful signs. RSS is everywhere. Companies like edgeio are building systems based on an enlightened philosophy identical to the philosophy of the original WWW (all publishers and all readers are equal). And microformats are building using the same philosophy as RSS.
On the other hand, while people like Steve Gillmor worry about pulling attention data out from behind the walled gardens, we are seeing the basic building-block of web 1.0, user-generated content, increasingly move behind walled gardens. Yahoo answers currently boasts ten million answers. Do you think Yahoo will freely allow Google to crawl and index those answers? Is MSN Expo about to let Google Base index their classifieds? All three of the big three are making it easier and more compelling for users to generate content directly into the Google/MSN/Yahoo-plex, and taking ownership of that data in a way that is decidedly not what TimBL imagined. For a whole slew of reasons, I think we’ll see the trend toward walled gardens increase, not decrease.
It’s not something I endorse, nor is it something I think will be able to endure. But I think it’s naive to be too optimistic right now. Let’s worry about keeping content open first, then we can worry about making the indexes open, and then maybe attention.