Syndicate This

In the post right before this one, you will see a widget for this blog I created using Goowy Media's yourminis service.  You can help make me famous by embedding it in your blog.  Or, you can install it on your desktop (you need to have Adobe's Apollo player first -- that's their cross-platform desktop equivalent of the Flash player for web browsers) , and wait patiently for it to alert you of my latest big idea.  Or, you can ignore my widget but check out many more useful ones people have built using Flash 8 and the yourminis API.

The bigger picture (and the reason behind this little experiment) is that more and more, the concepts of "content" and "site" are being disconnected.  My Facebook page aggregates posts I write on this blog, but I rarely if ever author original content specifically for that page.  Now, with tools like this, I can syndicate my content from here to any other property I control -- or to yours if you're willing to add me.  This strategy is already widely adopted by big players: Amazon already gets 40% of its revenues from affiliates.  And, embedded video players are a ubiquitous feature on many sites and de rigueur for any serious video hosting provider out there today. 

All this will be quite natural for players of three-dimensional chess. The rest of us still have some mental contortions to go through in order to fully appreciate the meaning and impact of this.  (Here are a couple of good posts from Sim Simeonov and Mike Hirshland at Polaris Venture Partners on the topic.) 

The general sense is that while widgets are now an essential part of any publishing strategy, the business model for widget publishers (e.g., yourminis) is pretty limited unless they can find a way to get ads into the widgets, or get a cut of whatever commercial action flows through them somehow.  The latter might actually be a little more relevant on the mobile devices that seem a more natural home for the (small) widget form factor.  Maybe the network carrier and the widget publisher might be able to split some sort of transaction toll or recurring service charge that can't happen on the public Internet?

Another idea would be to embed some sort of tracking handle in any widget coding standard that emerges, so we could track deployment and use of these things.