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October 25, 2006
Diffusing engagement
Diffusing engagement: You probably already know that I spent time studying general semantics, the way that language controls thought... for a quick intro, check Wikipedia on Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Anyway, earlier today Robert Scoble started talking about his blog's differing clickthrough rates from links on various sites, which he called "engagement", and all the other crosslinking bloggers followed suit, as you can see from the TechMeme link above. To be fair, there is indeed precedent for using this term to refer to the link-clicking rates of different websites, although you'll notice that most of these top hits use the term "engagement" incidentally, rather than definitionally. This is on the day the Adobe Engagement Platform is finally made explicit. Coincidence, intention, I can't tell... reminds me of how you may be walking down the sidewalk and someone walks out of a casino, looks at you, then chooses an exact intersect path to make you break your stride... it's hard to estimate how much others have on the ball, whether they're intentional critters or are on cruise control. What I do know is that the TechMeme world has changed today, even though it may take a few months and something on the order of a billion-dollar video deal to bring them to acknowledge it. (What's the better term for the revenue-bearing traffic you may get from a link on another site? I don't know, and don't much care, but you might try "clickout", "clickthrough rate", "click propensity", "link value", these all seem like they'd come to mind before "engagement".) Might be just unhappy coincidence, but no worries, reality does break through eventually.
Posted by JohnDowdell at October 25, 2006 05:58 PM
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