Seth Godin – Image via Wikipedia

Seth Godin announced Squidoo’s latest venture this week. Brands in Public is, as I understand it, an aggregation of conversations about certain brands. Godin’s team has apparently developed a nice way to aggregate and parse out relevant conversation about various brands and put them all together in one big page. That’s not all that innovative, but how they’re going about it is eyebrow raising.

First, Brands in Public will aggregate conversations and create these aggregation points for brands without their consent or buy in. There’s nothing wrong with that. The conversations are public and no one “owns” them. However, in order for a brand to officially have a presence on the page and highlight their responses to certain issues, etc., they have to pay $400 per month or more.

At first glance, you just think, “So what? The brands can just participate in the conversations on the various social networks and they Brands in Public spider will pick up those conversations as well. Hopefully, Brands in Public isn’t doing anything sha