Every once in a while, I check in with the Gesturelab, to see if there’s something comprehensible there … some solid point about the future of web-based biz that I can take away and grok over. 

So inject this little graf into your neo-cortex and see if you get some clarity:

…who is the competition here? Yahoo? I think not. As YouTube rolls up
television, Yahoo becomes more of a partner than a competitor. A more
RSS-controlled TV Guide provides additional inventory for Yahoo to hang
communities of interest around the survivors in the content compression
that is now underway. The Beck concert and original video are Yahoo’s
future as a studio — as with all the Office 2.0 startups on display
last week, Yahoo’s best opportunity is to go vertical with its
not-so-micro communities by slipstreaming behind the Yoogle APIs.

Ouch.

I feel like … like Bryan Singer felt on the set of The Usual Suspects, when Benecio del Toro showed up and started talking in the whispery slurring mumble … "In ENGLISH, please?"

Man, Fenster had nothing on this stuff.

Best I can do is that Yahoo is going to get steamrollered by the Google-YouTube merger and that their best bet for survival in the Brave New Streaming Video future is to keep producing unique and high-demand original content and thus keep the users that hang around Yahoo, still hanging around Yahoo. 

I think.

Feeling better?  Well, try this one on for size:

Remember: it’s not the ability to watch a missed show on the Net that
counts, it’s the ability to watch enough of it to click away and never
come back. In the Yoogle universe, it’s negative gestures that carve
out the most useful real estate.

This I think I understand – along the lines of the old Hollywood truism that "Sometimes, it’s the deal that you DON’T make that are the most important … "  i.e. despite all the money, you pass on the chance to star/direct/produce the next "Gigli" or "Ishtar" or "Poseidon" … but I’m still not certain how you would define that which you don’t do as real estate, unless you have some way of tracking the user’s inactions.  Which becomes a real bizarre hall of mirrors – what – are you supposed to track how much time I DON’T devote to watching 1st-tier cable TV? How many Starbuck’s lattes I DON’T consume?  On a personal level, yeah, this is akin to an alcoholic tallying up how many shots of vodka they didn’t take today, which makes sense, since you’re defining yourself by the harmful actions that you have managed to willpower yourself into not taking …

But on a more macro scale, I’m not sure I can get my mind around how your negative gestures can be aggregated and understood as being conscious "gestures."  Maybe I’m not watching CBS’ Thursday night lineup because I haven’t been exposed to it, and thus I don’t yet know that I like it.  Or that if exposed, I wouldn’t like it and make the conscious gesture to go out in my back yard with a wireless notebook and log onto Revver for the latest quirky Hungarian folk song dance contests …

Gillmore says that the "experts" are betting that Google will in itself be an operating system within the next two years.  I can’t really see that as yet.  There are way, way too many issues associated with being the OS that ships with the truckloads of Dells and Sony laptops for Google to jump into that space in two years.  And if they were going to try to get into it as freeware … well, that’s what Linus is for, right? Sheesh.  Why bounce into a space that will require you to do the inevitable bug fixes as all the script kiddies out there grope your code for cracks&hacks? Talk about a great way to turn yourself from "that cool application that helps me get what I want" to "that goddam OS that keeps crashing because the bugs that came along with that Alsatian porn keep compromising the kernel."

Or something like that.