TheWayoftheWeb

Due to the litigation case between Viacom and Google, a federal court has ordered Google to produce:

all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website

Time to boycott any Viacom products? Read more details on how this erroneously ignores the protection of the US Video Privacy Protection Act on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s website. For the record, actions like this are a far bigger problem than Twitter failing to scale!

I don’t tend to blow my own trumpet too much, although the large Adage Power 150 widget on the left probably undermines my posturing as a humble wordsmith… But after relaunching on my own domain, losing two years of Google PR and inbound links, and then spending ages going round updating everything, we’re finally moving in the right direction.

The latest list of top marketing blogs is on Spinning Around, filtered to show just UK marketing bloggers. And TheWayoftheWeb is finally moving back up the rankings. Of course it’d move faster if I ever get my page rank back! But a jump of 5 UK places, and 43 global places in a month is a sign I may be doing something worth linking and reading to.

And yet I was going to post about how relaxing I found blogging in the month before I’d reset Google Analytics to track readership on here!

Forrester Senior Analyst Jeremiah Owyang publishes a valuable blog, Web Strategy by Jeremiah, for anyone in the digital space.

It’s a must-read, hence making it into my blogroll. And one of his most recent posts is a classic, in which he compares the amount of data the U.S Government has on Generation Y, and compares it to the data which Facebook has access to.

And although the Government will have access to sources it won’t have publicised, and has ways to access anything if it really tries, the interesting point is that Facebook has accrued all this data by participants self-submitting it. No census, no artificial rewards, no incentive schemes, and no forcing people.

Check out Jeremiah’s insightful thoughts, and make sure you check out the comments which are normally just as informative.

For a while I’ve read various people debating whether ‘traditional’ terms for people online are still effective. Do we really just want ‘visitors’ - as if they turn up, pay their museum entry fee, look at the exhibits and then leave? Or is it fair to assume they’re users - as if we’re peddling heroin? Especially as a ‘user’ is linked to user accounts and usernames. And only those who actually make a transaction can really be termed ‘consumers’. (They’re not ‘Unique Users’ in analytics/metrics, they’re Unique IPs…but I think that’s not something that can be changed now!)

I think it’s a shame that ad agencies and computing have sewn up ‘client’. It’s more informal than consumer, and yet infers a bit more choice and power on the part of the individual than the other terms. And like an agency, any website publisher has to constantly evolve and adapt to meet the needs of their clients…

I did try to work out a reason for renaming the audience Flibbertigibbets, but even my tenuous grip on reality struggled with that one.

So, like an age old riddle, what’s someone who can come and read a website and leave, come and interact, or come and take part in spending money?

So far, my best effort is ‘Participant‘. If we accept that participation starts at going to a url and observing the content, and goes up to spending every second of the day interacting, posting, uploading and purchasing. And if you look at the Wikipedia entries for participation, it starts to make sense:

‘Participation, in addition to its dictionary definition, has specific meanings in certain areas.

• Participation (decision making), a notion in theory of management, economics and politics
• Participation (VR), a notion from virtual reality
• Participation (ownership), sharing something in common with others
• Participation (Finance), getting some benefit from the performance of a certain underlying asset

• Participation constraint (ER modelling), a special case of a multiplicity constraint’

So it can incorporate decision making, benefit, multiplicity, sharing, and being involved in a virtual reality? If you really want, you can split it into Reading Participants, Posting Participants, Uploading Participants, Buying Participants. You can even have a past participle if it makes you happy!

I’d be interested to know if other people think it’s a change worth making, and whether it’s worth participating or not?