Peter Wilkensen preached on the Parable of the Sower at St. Ebbes today. Tho it was not his point, something new that struck me was that the wheat from the seed that falls among thorns does not die, as does that from the seed that falls on stony places. Rather, it is “unfruitful”. Presumably it lives, but so shaded from the sun by the distraction of the thorny weeds that it lives and dies naturally, but without fruit. This is quite different from the fate of the seed in the stones, but perhaps even sadder.

Here are the thorn texts from Matthew, followed by the text in full:

13:7 And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them:

13:22 He also that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the word; and the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful.

(more…)

For any of you who have heard me rant about widgets lately, you should know that I found some personal vindication tonight watching CNBC’s Fast Money when this little gem came on…

By the way, the show has plenty of web-extra video, including longer form clips of nearly every segment of that day’s show in their Rapid Recap.

Here’s a look at the widget for yourselves.

But for all of us in the industry, what is so tough to comprehend about widgets? Ok, you want a portable rich media unit that plays video and drives traffic back to your main site to sign up for newsletters or podcasts. And you want to measure total embeds, total minutes of video delivered across each distribution platform, sign-ups for the newsletters and downloads of podcasts. You’d like to look look at the average abandonment point where people are dropping off so you can trim the video segments to deliver an optimized user experience.

Which one of those are you going to call your primary success metric, secondary success metrics, and did you achieve them or not? At end end of the day, is the total number of minutes of video content of the “Fast Money” show viewed, aggregated across all of the platforms, the most important measure? If, after a week, there is a drop off of in watching video through the widget, is it a failure?

With all of these moving parts - which differ for each vertical category of advertisers and niche content - why are people looking for ‘one’ metric - engagement - to replace the universal CTR? I’m not suggesting that CTR should stick around, but we need to accept the fact that online media has gotten a lot more complicated than it ever has been, and we should treat it and talk about it as such. But I digress….

Nice job CNBC. Clean, functional widget that meets your goals. Too bad that co-host Jeff Macke called it a virus, and regular contributor Tim Seymour explained why it shouldn’t be called a widget to begin with. (Tim - I’m with you, buddy!) But I hope you factor that into account when you measure total downloads and evaluate the results.

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TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Allegro pulls in $4M for lung-cancer molecular diagnostics (release)
• Ocular bandage developer I-Therapeutix raises $6M (Mass High Tech)
• NanoBio gets last of $30M for skin-infection drugs (release)
• Cayenne Medical raises $15M for sports medicine (release)
• Aridis Pharma seeks $10M for oral-form drugs and vaccines (VentureWire)
• Neurosurgical device maker Nfocus Neuro acquires StarFire Medical (release)