Now that I've gotten him sorted out from his journalist brother Dan, I'd like to introduce technology360 readers to Steve Gillmor, a contributing editor at ZDNet, blogger, and host of a weekly podcast on ITConversations.com called The Gillmor Gang. Steve was kind enough to help (as did Dan) with two sessions at the Public Broadcasting New Media Summit 2005 in San Francisco (I'm on the board of the sponsoring Integrated Media Association). One of those was helping with a 3-hour working group on the "public service publisher" initiative on which I've been working for the past two months (more about this will be posted here later today). At one point, he jokingly described his role as providing "tough love" to the group -- but that was entirely appropriate and just what we needed.
The best thing for me, however, was being able to spend some quality time over much of three days with someone who has clearly done deep thinking about one of my key priorities -- but from an entirely different dimension. I learned a lot and made a major adjustment in my thinking about the architecture of the public service publisher. For example, I've come to believe that RSS can be much more than a cool add-on and that we should approach it architecturally in the public service publisher as a third (and perhaps eventually the first) focus of entry to the content -- central portal and station application interface being the other two (Steve is a co-proposer of the attention.xml spec which has strong applicability to all this and about which I'll write when I think I understand it better).
Steve has written about this meeting in his own InfoRouter weblog and included my co-conspirator, radio producer Stephen Hill (Hearts of Space), in this week's episode of The Gillmor Gang. Steve, I'm glad that we found the wormhole between our parallel universes. I'll use it to traverse back and forth frequently. --Dennis
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