First off, kudos to Nielsen for having the IQ to monitor the metasphere and for having the get up and go to write an email to an insignificant blogger, offer a clarification of a situation, and exhibit patience with the mainstream media when and if it presumably jumps to erroneous conclusions.

Earlier this week I wrote this piece about a new Nielsen site called Hey! Nielsen. Using links to some establishment media coverage, my post furthered the notion that Nielsen, via widgets, was hatching a plot to monitor what we do when not on the Nielsen site. In a rather flip reaction to that I wrote something like, "Hey Nielsen, monitor this!"

Today I received an email from Steve Ciabattoni, Sr. Content Manager at Hey! Nielsen. He read my post and took exception to the mainstream media interpretation and my autonomic reiteration. I'm guilty of believing everything I read in the paper sometimes, too. Shame on me. In any event, Mr. Ciabattoni said to me:

We'd be just as concerned as you if the part about the Hey! Nielsen widget were true. Unfortunately, the site you were pulling the story from seemed to be poorly paraphrasing and poorly attributing our official press release, which states:

  "Members will be able to install Hey! Nielsen "widgets" on their desktops or other social networking sites in order to track developments and Hey! Nielsen scores for entertainment they care about even when they are not on the site."

I can almost see how they misinterpreted this sentence, but allow me to clarify.

The Hey! Nielsen widget simply pulls information from the Hey! Nielsen site so that users can keep track of what's happening on Hey! Nielsen via their MySpace page or wherever they might want to install the widget. We are not tracking activity on the sites where the widget is installed. We measure only that the widget is residing on a specific page on Myspace or wherever. Other than knowing that people have installed the widget, it captures absolutely no personal information about the user. It's a one-way file.

You know what? This is what I admire most about the blogosphere: dialogue, people talking, people reading and responding. Thank you Mr. Ciabattoni for being tuned in; thank you for caring enough to correct the record per Nielsen's position. But next time you have a new product launch, call me and a couple hundred fellow bloggers. We'll represent your news more accurately; more fairly; and with a substantially broader reach.

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