Evan Williams (pictured above), the CEO of Odeo, has a very thoughtful and insightful blog entry on how “Pageviews are Obsolete.”
Of specific interest to us here is the role widgets are playing in that process of obsolesence.
Here’s the part about widgets,
“Another reason: Widgets. The web is becoming increasingly widgetized—little bits of functionality from one site are displayed on many others. The purveyors of a widget can track how many times their javascript of flash file is loaded elsewhere—but what does that mean? If you get a widget loaded in a sidebar of a blog without anyone paying attention to it, that’s not worth anything. But if you’re YouTube, and someone’s watching a whole video and perhaps even an ad you’re getting paid for, that’s something else entirely. But is it a pageview?”
