Steve Gillmor's Got My Attention

Steve Gillmor parted company with ZDNet and shut down his InfoRouter blog a few weeks ago, stating afterward on his personal blog that there were "real issues, some of which I can't discuss except by indirection."

I was upset to see InfoRouter shuttered, because I've come to appreciate Gillmor's bizarre takes on Web 2.0, which read like tech magazine hype filtered through Dennis Hopper.

Cracking open the story lines: engaging Hollywood and the record business. Not by embarrassing or attacking the Cartel, but by peeling the layers of the emergent user in control of point to point content. As I told Furrier last night, tech is the new rock n roll. The big budget production is not the target, nor is user generated content. Everybody except the Gang make the mistake of voting at one end or the other of this continuum. In fact, PROFESSIONALLY rendered user-controlled content is the sweet spot. It's not amateur hour, it's applying low-barrier technology and rapid development methodology to the real competition: soap operas. ... We're funding this effort by delivering return on investment (datapoints) to users and incenting them away from silos and towards the pool.

Please don't ask me what that means.

Gillmor's a tech journalist turned tech blogger turned tech evangelist, pushing the concept of attention, which I can't explain because it doesn't hold mine. Lately, he's been baiting current and former colleagues into arguments regarding his work performance.

When Gillmor claimed that the Gillmor Gang tech podcast had been cancelled by Sirius Radio, Adam Curry responded that it was demoted from regular airing because of the show's lack of updates.

If you can demonstrate consistent, timely delivery of the Gillmor Gang, it will be welcomed with open arms into Sirius rotation. ... Give the Audience the respect it deserves.

When Gillmor wrote that he was fired from his eWeek blog in 2004 because "I just didn't give a damn what some online pinhead in the San Francisco office had to say about what journalism was all about," his former editor Matthew Rothenberg replied that the real disagreement was over his lack of updates.

We didn't burn out on you based on page views, we burned out on you because you weren't actually posting much of anything! I could pay a high-school kid or my mom or a fire hydrant not to post -- and pay them a lot less than we were shelling out to you based (ironically or not) on your past tech bona fides working for the mainstream media you affect to disdain.

I don't know what's going on here, but as a writer myself, I wouldn't want to get into public fights with former editors regarding busted deadlines (thank God I've never missed one). One of Gillmor's final InfoRouter posts stated that he recently quit Paxil and lost a beloved 13-year old family dog, both of which might make bridge-burning seem like a better idea than it is.

Tech · Journalism · 2006/08/14 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

At least Gillmore's writing is entertaining. Too bad his most stylish stuff is unintelligible. I liked your "tech magazine hype filtered through Dennis Hopper" simile.

Timothy Leary's acid-drenched writing comes to mind when I read the bizarro sermons.

Paxil is a serotonin reuptake inhibitor. LSD bonds to 5-HT receptors in the brain, preventing serotonin from sending neural messages.

Hmm...

#1 · Gizmodo · 2006/08/14

After clicking on your 'stated' link, and reading Gillmore's post, I could only feel respect for someone unafraid to make himself as vulnerable as he did. It takes some guts to lay it all out like that.

#2 · Tune In · 2006/08/15