Wilco in St. Louis

I saw Wilco in St. Louis on Thursday night with Donna. It was the first of three straight nights of shows at the Pageant theater in University City. If you’re in St. Louis and didn’t get to go, they’ve recorded two of the shows and will be posting them shortly. Highly recommended.

The “news is in the noise”

Robert Scoble: “I like the noise. Why? Because I can see patterns before anyone else. I saw the Chinese earthquake happening 45 minutes before Google News reported it. Why? Because I was watching the noise, not the news.”

This is one of Scoble’s best posts since he left Microsoft. Robert is a student of journalism and trends in the media. What he is describing is the process by which news will be reported in the future. As the “blogosphere” has talked about the death of establishment/traditional media with the rise of the Internet, blogs and podcasts, many have overlooked a very important point. The establishment media will be able to keep up and stay relevant if they are able to put the right tools and people in place to sift through all of the “noise” and find new stories, spot trends, and explain to the masses.

The masses may never be on Twitter. Even if they were many important news stories will pop up in new and interesting places. The people that can find those new places, sift through the noise and find the things that are interesting to the masses will always have an important role to play in delivering the news.

Staring into a bright future

Steve Gillmor ties together a bunch of disconnected thoughts, ideas and trends in a post that snidely refers to Bill Gates getting a gold watch and retiring. Steve is a savant of sorts. He spots patterns and trends that others can’t see but struggles to articulate why they’re there and what they’ll lead to.

But there is a redeeming quote in the piece: “But don’t think that just because Google will prosper that Microsoft won’t. Live Mesh can fit into this like a glove, feeding downstream vertical versions of affinity groups to skinned Silverlight containers. We’re within weeks of offerings already from Twhirl, FriendFeed, Summize, and others we just haven’t been told about yet. All Microsoft needs to do is get Bill his gold watch and get back to work.”

What Steve is missing is that the work hasn’t ever stopped and that the “ship cycles” are very long. We are at a major inflection point but we don’t leave all of our past investments behind. Just as Facebook started nearly 5 years ago as a slick app for college kids to connect with their friends and now represents a “social graph”, the infrastructure that Microsoft has built out for internet presence (Live Messenger, Spaces), collaborative business applications (SharePoint, CRM) and end-user enablement on the desktop (Excel, Word)  are now rapidly converging into something new. To Steve’s point, Mesh could be an innovative way to rapidly innovate and distribute more of these scenarios while leveraging the people and tools we’re already tied into. SilverLight could be a big part of how the experience is delivered. Either way, something new and significant is coming together here.

I’m not sure that Steve sees it, but I’d say the future looks very bright here for Microsoft.

UPDATE- Steve sees it.