Online Media Cultist

There’s lots of chatter and buzzy buzz about widgets these days, so it’s easy to forget that most regular folk have no earthly idea what they are. For our purposes, we’re actually talking about what Wikipedia terms as “web widgets,” defined as “a third party item that can be embedded in a web page.”

Because of the explosion of regular people publishing billions of pages in the form of blogs and other websites, and particularly the crazy growth of social networking profiles (which are really pre-created web pages that get filled in with information and media provided by the user) on sites like MySpace, the widget industry was born.

So widgets are “extra stuff” that get installed (via simple copy-and-pasting of code into a web page template) on web pages. The question I always think about when I see a widget is: who is the widget for? Is it for a public-facing audience i.e. people visiting that web page or MySpace profile, or is it predominantly there to serve information to the person who installed it?

As a web publisher, it’s important to recognize the difference and utilize a website’s limited real estate, as GigaOM alludes to in a piece entitled “Widget Mania run amok?”

Read/WriteWeb runs down a list of widget examples, and notes the new popularity of “widget commerce,” such as Auction Ads, which allows you to dynamically get updates on selected eBay auctions. I’d argue that this is a good example of a useful widget for the person who installs the widget, but very likely would only appear to be clutter to anyone else. Therefore, it’s a great idea to add this kind of widget to a Netvibes or My Yahoo page (i.e. web pages designed for personal consumption only), but not to a blog, with perhaps the rare exception of one that focuses on eBay auctions or e-commerce.

Personally, I think that with widgets, less is more. MyBlogLog is an ideal widget for blogs, I love to argue, because they serve multiple audiences well. The web publisher gets to see who is visiting his or her site, MyBlogLog members get to have their profile picture show up around the web (which fosters networking and connections), and community is promoted among bloggers and readers with similar interests.

And I also run FeedBurner’s widget, which shows how many RSS readers Online Media Cultist has on any particular day, mostly because I’m a stats junkie!

Feedburner has launched a new service that tracks both site traffic and RSS subscribers in one place. While many publishers use one service (such as Site Meter) to track on-site page views and another to track RSS subscribers, this is the first time a comprehensive service has been offered that allows publishers to get a bird’s eye view of all site visitors in one place.

Publishing 2.0 is forward-looking enough to posit a future where we can finally drop the vocabulary that often confuses conversations about how “popular” a site is and move to “a new metric called ‘content views,’ which is agnostic to where or how content is viewed.”

Achieving a standard definition of measuring how many people view a website would have profound repercussions for online media companies. Conversations between publishers and advertisers would be vastly simplified, for one. A new wave of services that rank sites according to content views could also then potentially emerge to compete with and perhaps surpass the likes of Alexa’s traffic rankings.

While most people seem to respect Alexa’s rankings, no one really likes them or agrees that they’re anywhere near accurate. This uncertainty can affect things such as site valuation, funding, business development deals, advertising, and so on. A quick Google News search brought up this anguished plea: “Alexa.com’s indexing of website popularity is fatally flawed. All you need to do to verify this is compare your own internal website analytics with the tracking provided by Alexa.”

A common definition of site traffic coupled with a standard way to measure all of the ways that people view Internet content – and Feedburner is in the best position to do this for the time being – may open the door to a better way to rank Internet traffic.