DISQUS

Barney Moran · 1 year ago

Include in your cloud flow the actual VALUE of the data (i.e. specific sites stats and relationships) and arrow the financial value both coming from this data, and flowing (if it is) back to the creator of the data, the source entity, namely the blog publisher and member of any unique network. Then you have a spanking, realistic world view. Remember when advising publishers on blog tools to include consideration of how these data aggregators and providers make their money. So far getting a straight answer on this has also proven to be the $64,000 question.

That’s why P.U.B. was created: To demand a straight answer on how these widgets and networks make money, and transparently share this with each and every Blog Publisher who chooses to install these widgets or join these groups.

Beyond widget(s) analytic and network functionality is the privacy of these statistics and how they are used by the Widget/Networking company. The question P.U.B. asks for Blog Publisher’s is: “What is the financial motivation(s) of your widget that is vying for a spot on our blogs, and is this transparent to the host publisher?”

Just as, or perhaps more critical then visible function of widgets, is the safety of the private information these widgets may be gathering, unbeknownst to the unwitting Publisher who installs them, about their site. Who do they sell this info to? What do they make on it? How much goes back to the source Publisher?

P.U.B. [Publishers Union of Bloggers] has pending inquires to Widget Providers concerning how they generate their income and what percentage of this income goes to the Blog Publisher making the critical decision to allow a Widget on their site for their readers. In addition we are requesting transparency on the critical issue of how the private statistic from Publishers Blogs are being used, hopefully with the Publisher’s permission!

For example, P.U.B. expects to heard back from Lijit on these financial and private statistics issues from P.U.B’s inquiry we sent to Lijit in mid April 2008. When we do we will let great Blog Publishers like you know their deal. Currently we are also working with Blog Publishers to track performance hit evaluations of Widgets too. Let us know if you have any follow up on any of these important issues for the blog community.

Will publish these results to keep the community of Blog Publishers informed on this critical component of Widgets on our Blogs.

Barney Moran for P.U.B.

robdiana · 1 year ago

Fantastic information as usual Louis. The problem I see right now is that Gnip is purely a data warehouse. The difficulty of providing the APIs that are basically the "real time" feed for any of their partners is that there is very little context. Most software developers need a little more expressiveness in the API because there is a specific method that they want to call. The "sets" are a great concept for what they are doing and it could help with the general load as well.

Obviously, they are still new so I cannot pass judgment on them yet. I think in order to become "really" successful, they will need to provide different API views for the different types of sites. Many people will find it hard to make the translation between a single API for Twitter and Delicious and know what the data is supposed to mean. In any case, I am watching them closely as it will be interesting to see how it goes.

Tweet My Blog · 1 year ago

That's great news - hopefully Twitter will end up with fewer of those pesky whale pages (over capacity)