Tracking the meme

I was thinking about the new mps button, and viral marketing and
memes, and mod-pubsub, and about the new wiki page for sites that use
mod-pubsub, and stuff, and I was kind of stuttering on a comment jp
made about the inherent weakness of depending on people to register
things manually (useful in some contexts, a barrier in others, but that's
another topic)...

...and I thought, it sure would be nice if we knew where the mps-button
was getting to, and how often people were being exposed to it...

What if we embedded a jscript in the button that did a quick pubsub 'ping'
to the mps server? Then, whenever a page that contains the mps-button is
opened, we'd get a ping. With this feedback, we could monitor how wide
and how fast the meme is spreading. That seems useful.

Then I started wondering what kind of information should be contained
in this ping, if any. I think another mps-er named Mike was just
recently wondering how to discover what other event publications are
lurking just around the corner. Could event producers (electively, those
that want to be discoverable) use the ping to include some kind of
basic namespace/topic info about, say, the root topic space that their
feed publishes to? So that their feed could be dynamically discovered by
prospective consumers?

I also am very interested in this issue of 'discoverability of feeds'...

Thoughts?


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