Feedonomics

Guy Kawasaki is a combination entrepreneur/heat-seeking venture capitalist who tries on new ideas like teeshirts. The latest jersey is Truemors.com, an SEO bloggers dream that posts any and all rumors about well-known people, places, and events. Truemor readers are even allowed to contribute posts.

Kawasaki built a “private label” Grazr widget, meaning the Truemors logo is prominently displayed at the top of the widget. With it, he collects the Truemors site feed, posts it on his “other” blog, and pushes it out to anyone else who wants to post the widget on their site. “It drives traffic from one of my efforts to another,” he says, “so that people who are reading my blog go to my Web site.”

Kawasaki says no technical know-how is required. “Between my web guy and the Grazr people, I didn’t have to do much at all.” He thinks a Grazr widget is a good way to add value to site content. “In my case, it’s from one property to another, but others can incorporate content from sites that they don’t own. It’s an easy way to enrich the information provided.”

Tom Foremski makes a good point about Facebook aggregating everyone else’s traffic through widgets. If your site is based on ads from page views, then widgets eliminate that revenue stream. Monetizing the widget with ads is an apparent solution, but sites don’t own all the widgets using their content. Monetizing the feed delivering the content with interstitial ad items is the next step, but the growth of feed merging technology means that a site can’t be sure their feed will be delivered intact. We are getting down to the atom unit of the feed item. All items from commercial sites will have to include ads eventually. If that was the only solution, this would be OK, but I’m afraid we will see pages with ads that have widgets with ads that display feeds with interstitial ads that contain items with ads. I wonder what the click-through rate will be then?

We released the new user interface for the Grazr widget yesterday, and it seemed to go smoothly. I think Mike did an amazing job. He really is an extremely talented coder. Last week was a year since I first started talking to Mike about Grazr, so I guess this is its birthday also.

This example comes from the GrazrScript tutorial, and it shows how to create a custom sports news widget. I’m starting a book project next month that will have me blogging on GrazrScript programming like this every day.

With this release we have finally come to the end of the current development path for our little widget. It is all grown up now. There will be a few more minor changes, but for the next year almost all of our attention will shift to the rest of the Grazr product. You can expect to see big changes in the Grazr.com website and the GrazrScript language fairly soon. We are also completely rewriting our feed database technology, but that won’t be visible as new features until later this year. I don’t mean to be coy, but we’re still finalizing our feature set, so I don’t want to promise specifics that I can’t deliver.

Mike isn’t the only one building all this new stuff. We have hired 4 of the best programmers from my last company, Andover.net, and they each have over 10 years of Web development experience. We are still looking for a few more Perl and JavaScript coders to join us. If you want to know more, send a resume to [ jobs AT grazr DOT com ].