Let’s get this out of the way right off the bat — I am not the sharpest tool in the shed. Not the brightest light on the tree. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer. You get the picture. I’m certainly not as smart as Nick Carr, as I have pointed out before. That said, however, I do have an English degree — and I still can’t figure out what the heck Steve Gillmor is talking about in his recent column about… well, whatever it’s about.

It’s not just me. Even Nick “I went to Harvard” Carr can barely figure it out. It has something to do with Nick and a recent podcast, and the current fetish for not including links in blog posts — which as my M-lister pal Kent Newsome has noted, is a load of elitist hogwash. For whatever it’s worth, Kent can’t make head nor tails of what Steve is on about in his column either.

For one thing, it’s all wrapped up in Steve’s patented “GestureBank” metaphorology, or whatever the hell it is. You know, like this stuff:

“Clicking on a link does not pay the author; it pays the signaller (in this case the aggregator, publisher, or arbitrager of the link’s “value.”) The author of the content is paid in link credits, which tether him or her to the tyranny of the mediocrity of broadcast economics.”

Riiiiiiiiight. There’s plenty more where that came from too, about “negative gesturing at its root level,” and something about tipping your waitress and how the tip reflects… well, something (Valleywag has some fun with Steve’s inscrutability here). And in there somewhere is a bit of response to people like Kent who have rejected the “no linking” policy Steve seems to be pushing. Steve says he secretly agrees that links are good karma, but they tie people to the current model, and he’s looking way down the road at some GestureBank future that the rest of us can’t see. Best of luck with that, Steve.

I’m going to stick with Kent — links are a sign that you don’t know it all, that ideas come from somewhere and go somewhere, and that they flow through blogs and comments and other places and ultimately create value somewhere. Whether they tie me to some blog-publishing feudal system is beyond my capacity to say. Like I said, I’m an English major. All I know is, I hope Steve is getting paid by the word.

As an admirer of Dan Gillmor and what he has done in the past — and what he tried to do with his “citizen’s media” venture, bayosphere.com — I felt more than a twinge of regret when I read his open letter about the demise of Bayosphere. But I think Adam Green of Darwinianweb.com has the right viewpoint: Dan should be proud of what he tried to do, not ashamed because it didn’t work (neither should Mark Evans).

As Adam notes, failure is almost a prerequisite when it comes to trying new and challenging things. He says he asks almost every executive of a startup to describe a failure from their past, and is suspicious when they don’t admit to one. Adam also congratulates Dan for providing a “sincere and thoughtful analysis” of what happened at Bayosphere, and I would like to echo that thought as well. At this point, everyone is making their best guesses about what is happening with Media 2.0 or whatever you want to call it, and (hopefully) trying to learn what works and what doesn’t.

Dan’s post definitely helps in that regard, but it also raises plenty of questions — as it should. Was Bayosphere too local? Were the restrictions on who could be a “citizen journalist” too strict? Would a model like Newsvine.com, which is both broader in scope and more open, work better? What about one that incorporates both “old” media sources and new media, with a voting system — a la digg.com or reddit.com — built in? What about a system that compensates citizen journalists based on their articles, which Gather.com seems to be trying to build? Kent Newsome thinks Bayosphere is a sign of how hard building an audience in Media 2.0 is.

Anyway, congratulations on a valiant effort, Dan. You have nothing to be ashamed of.

Update:

Tim Porter has a thoughtful discussion of some of the issues raised by Dan’s experience at Bayosphere, one of which is that “community can’t be forced.” (hat tip to Online News Squared for pointing that one out).