What is the Most Valuable Function Online?

That would be search. It allows you, the user, to find information and content you need and want, fast. Google gets that, and they serve your ads with it. Search also allows a site owner to figure out what people are looking for - there are services like Lijit that give you a snapshot of what people looked for on your aggregated content.

Take publications with great content and deep, digital archives, and you can see why. There are already a few search APIs out there - the New York Times announced one recently, so did NPR and TechCrunch. [hat tip to Jeff Jarvis]

If you scroll down on the Daylife page, you will see the corner dedicated to the API. One cool thing I like about their implementation is that it, like Lijit and other search APIs, allow you to see what others have found interesting. Given that peer to peer impressions are much more powerful than any content source alone, transparency in that function is a bonus.

Will the use of APIs change news? Has news changed on the basis of readers and listeners comments? What will you do with the data? How do you use the search results of your publication? Do you feed them back into the way you plan content and what your business offers?

Take a practical application for entrepreneurs - patents. There is a Google AJAX Patent Search API you can use. I am also intrigued by Jarvis' question. If you could access any data through APIs, what would you want to access and what would you do with that data?

If search is an important function, what you do with the results, the data? Will it help you take your business forward? How would you go about it? We have gotten really good at collecting and amassing enormous amounts of data. What stories will emerge when the data is actionable?

Comments

[Barney Moran]

Along with the ability to search data is the VALUE of this data. Who owns it? What about each individual blogger’s data and the critical sanctity of Publishers private statistics. We at P.U.B. consider the safety of the information any app or widget(s) may be gathering, unbeknownst to the unwitting Publisher who installs them.

P.U.B. [Publishers Union of Bloggers] has pending inquires to Widget Providers concerning how they generate their income and what percentage of this income goes to the Blog Publisher making the critical decision to allow a Widget on their site for their readers. In addition we are requesting transparency on the critical issue of how the private statistic from Publishers Blogs are being used, hopefully with the Publisher’s permission!

P.U.B. expected to hear back from Lijit on these financial and private statistics issues from P.U.B’s inquiry we sent to Lijit in mid April 2008. So far all we’ve read is a public blog response from a Lijit employee advising Lijit has no money, and more recently, we received an email from Lijit’s CEO, Todd Vernon, attacking P.U.B. and falsely accusing we are writing fictitious emails. Any actual answers to our questions about the use of Publisher’s stats, or revenue as it applies to Lijit? Nada. Nothing. P.U.B.’s job is to fight for Publishers by asking the hard questions and demanding answers. If all Widget companies respond as Lijit’s done up to this point, P.U.B. has a big workload for our Publishers, and your membership and support helps us all as Publishers, thanks.

If P.U.B. gets a straight answer on topic from Lijit, not smoke and mirrors, we will let great Blog Publishers like you know their exact revenue/statistics use/sharing deal. Currently we are also working with Blog Publishers to track performance hit evaluations of Widgets, and the actual ownership of content pulled by widgets from our blogs.

Will publish these results to keep the community of Blog Publishers informed on this critical component of Widgets on our Blogs.

Sincerely,

Barney Moran
Founder, P.U.B.

[Valeria Maltoni]

The email I sent you as a way of welcome bounced back. My use of Lijit was an example, as all the other links, to talk about search functions. While I detect passion for the topic, the comment here seems to be making use of this forum for a specific agenda.

I encourage a positive and constructive stance - education would have worked better. For example, until this extensive comment, I had no idea there was a PUB. Who is PUB? Is there a member roster anywhere? You mention a community. Is there a wiki, a Ning group for this community to discuss the issue?

I have one simple rule for the teams I work with. Whenever you bring a problem, you also have the responsibility to offer paths to solutions, education, and an open mind to the group you brought the problem to. In other words - no dumping. Thank you.

[Jon]

Okay, I bit the troll...

Checked out the PUBber above, went to his site, looked for some reason to be there. With one angry, misspelled post, it took no time at all to click away. I can only surmise that Barney (located physically near the Lijit people) is an angry (ex)friend of someone attached to Lijit.

I tried several search engines on Wordout, and decided after a couple of months that Lijit was the sh... well, you know, the one I chose. (I'm not concerned with their business plan, their profits or where they get their money from. I'm concerned with WHAT WORKS for me.)

I do look at my search traffic and it does direct some of the upcoming content. Take, for instance, my Fake EMail series. I had no time one day so I slung together a grammatical critique of a scam email and posted it. I was sure it was a waste of time but I was trying to post as much content as possible back then.

Through search traffic alone, that piece became one of the most popular pieces to date. So I tried another with a similar title using a different scam email. BOOM! Shot straight to the top.

The result is that now I have a stable of Fake EMail posts that guarantee traffic every single day.

I'm still trying to figure out how to take advantage of that Thursday search for the letter 't' each week...

(phooey... still thinks I have an 'invalid email address'.)

[Valeria Maltoni]

What I come back time and again is how our own words and actions reflect on us. Plus there was this missed opportunity to connect. If someone takes the time to comment, why not invest it?

I also chose Lijit because it works. Having written more than 600 posts and continuing many of those conversations, I found it hard to search my own material and find what I was looking for with other search tools.

I would have plenty of material for scam email posts. With three email accounts, I get my fair share of solicitations. Which gives me an idea for a couple of posts. Brilliant!

Interestingly, my traffic is much more organic and comes mostly from readers or people I meet along the way. I do show up in a lot of searches given the range of topics I write about.

I'm looking into the email address for you.

[Todd Vernon]

Valeria, Thanks for giving Lijit a try and I'm glad you get value from it. Your analysis of Barney and PUB is clairvoyant. Perhaps "PUB" should come clean as to it's motivations.

Todd Vernon / CEO Lijit Networks

[Rebecca]

This is interesting to me since I can track the usage of the emails I send out to my organization lists. I can see who opens it and what they click on. It definitely changes how I put the emails together - photos are most popular with my crowd, and I also experiment - I put jobs in it today. I think the data is extremely powerful.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Todd - I admire diplomats a great deal. Negotiating anything is quite difficult, especially since emotions enter the equation early on. It is not a skill they teach in school, it would serve everyone if we did so. Conversation is so much about negotiating differing viewpoints! Imagine if Barney found a way to express his take that was constructive. The things we could do in our daily life if we all found a way to that place.

@Rebecca - you got it! Ogilvy said it a long time ago - direct response is very powerful. Now we can measure even more our efforts and communications.

[ninin]

I'll try lijit next time.

Thank you!!