The AOL Developer Network this morning posted a YouTube video of Alex Bard giving a 3–minute interview that nicely summarizes several viral widget principles.

Bard is a co-founder of Goowy Media, which, among other things, developed the yourminis start page. This past February Goowy was purchased by AOL. Under Bard, yourminis has developed into one of the largest widget platforms in the marketplace today.

In this video, made at the recent web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Bard summarizes several widget bullet points, including “elegant” monetization and a definition of “viral.”

This is definitely must-see. If you have buffering problems watching it on this site, you can see it here, on YouTube’s site.

Widget metrics are becoming more sophisticated.

Clearspring’s Jodi McDermott today published an article on one of Clearspring’s metrics named Active Placements.

The metric measures the count of a widget’s placements that have been viewed at least once during a specified time period.

This metric, when combined with the number of times the widget is grabbed and the number of times the widget is installed, can show a widget’s “staying power.”

“As widgets are grabbed and placed on web sites, their staying power is where the impact of the widget really shines,” says McDermott.

You can read the entire article on Jodi’s Widget Analytics blog here.

Right now, Opera is the only browser that has its own built-in widget platform. Not only that, the platform is a breeze to work with.

Widget lovers should seriously consider ditching their current browsers (Firefox, IE, Safari, etc.) and take a look at the Opera browser.

You want to search for a widget? Just click the Widgets menu that is built right into Opera’s main toolbar!

The “Add widgets” menu opens to Opera’s impressive Widgets page (below) of more than 1,200 instantly available widgets.

You are officially in widget heaven.

When you find the widget you want, you only need to click the “Launch” button below the widget’s picture.

The widget opens instantly to your desktop.

Resize your new widget, move it around, configure it, play with it. It’s that simple!

Plus, in addition to this seamless widget platform, the Opera browser is generally considered to be the fastest browser on the market today. That has certainly been my experience.

Also, there are some major Opera widget features in the works. New widgets are currently being developed for: (See here for more details.)

• Mobile devices
• TV and Set-Top Boxes
• Consumer Electronics
• Automotive & Transportation

Now, for some imortant caveats:

• You will not find every widget you want. You may have to search outside of Opera to get something special you are looking for.

• Almost all Opera widgets currently run only on the desktop. Only a select few of their widgets are currently embeddable into Web pages. Mobile widgets are in the works.

• When you close Opera, your widgets close also. (What I’ve been doing is minimizing Opera, and just using my widgets.)

P.S. The Opera widget platform includes development tools for creating custom widgets from scratch, i.e. not having to use widget templates, which is the case for some other “create your own widget” platforms. I’ll be creating some widgets in the coming days, and my next report on Opera widgets will about my widget-creating experiences and how Opera 9.5 beta 2, released just today, stacks up on the widget front. Stay tuned…

Who isn’t talking about going green this Earth Week? It’s a hail storm of green-themed content everywhere we turn: events, print inserts, special features, blogs, mags, lists and advertising messages…the sheer volume is downright un-greenlike in its excess. Mass(ive) marketing!

If you’re looking for a widget to save our earth, well, the technology hasn’t advanced that far yet, though we wholly support and would enjoy the opportunity to report such innovation.

But if you want to go beyond green to full color today, there are several widgets that provide a mental respite from all that serious concern over your “101 Ways I’m Going to Save the Earth” checklist.

To start, engage with the Colorburn widget from Firewheel Design. Find colorful inspiration, whether you go green or not.

Or use the Canvas2 widget on WidgetBox to doodle  in your favorite spray brush colors. (Don’t feel any peer pressure today to stick to green; innovate and create with these low-emission colors.)

Finally, if what you really seek is to duck the Al Gore eco-agenda and challenges for a later day, then the Yahoo! Rose-colored Glasses widget might be your best bet. It might make you mellower the next time you’re faced with paying $4 a gallon at the gas pump or having no A/C on a spare-the-air day.

P.S. To keep my own carbon footprint from spreading, I’m off on the bus to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Nuggets to follow…

Widget security is a topic that seems to lurk in the background, not getting much attention. One example of this is the huge RSA Security Conference held last week in San Francisco. It did not have ANY panels on widget security.

A MacWorld article on widget security said,
“Widgets are owned by the user, and can do anything that a user can do. For instance, they can remove files from your home directory without asking permission. They can run anything from the command line that a user can. They can call any AppleScript that a user can.”

Yesterday, one of the W3C drafts on widgets stated that, “When compared to Web browsers, some market-leading widget user agents have a comparatively relaxed security model that allows an instantiated widget to read, write, modify, and/or delete files, automatically upload files, automatically download files, execute local applications, and even perform cross-domain request to “mash-up” data from multiple different sources. All without the end-user having any indication that their privacy and security might be at risk.” (Bold formatting is mine.)

So how does a typical user address this problem? Most of us look the other way and just click the “Install Widget” button. We are often told to only download software from sources that we trust. Well, who ARE you supposed to trust, and WHY?

I would very much like to hear your comments on and experiences with this issue. I’ll be writing more on this subject.

This morning Victor Harwood of Digital Hollywood released his video on YouTube of an all-star panel discussing “Widgets as a Platform,” part of the recent 2008 Media Summit in New York.

The video (below) is must-see viewing for anyone in the widget industry. Among the topics addressed by the panel are strategies for distributed content, thoughts on engagement, and whether widget marketing is a fad or not.

Hooman Radfar, CEO & Co-founder, Clearspring Technologies
Kevin Freedman, Vice President, Finance & Operations, Slide
Eric Alterman, Chairman, KickApps
Dan Riess, Vice President, Marketing and Ad Solutions, Turner Broadcasting System
Sun Jen Yung, Managing Director, Investment Banking, Oppenheimer & Co., Moderator

(If you experience buffering or other problems with the video below, go here to watch it on YouTube’s page.)

I like history. I also like etymology. The origin and early growth of things, anything, fascinate me.

So when I saw Niall Kennedy’s “widget timeline,“ I spent a good 15 minutes soaking it in. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, and it may not be completely up-to-date, but it’s a very rewarding overview of widget history.

Make sure you play with and read all of the pop-ups. There’s a lot of useful information there. Thanks, Niall!

WidgetWebExpo, to be held in New York this June 16 and 17, has announced an amazing lineup of more than 20 widget topics, each one addressing critical issues and questions in the widget marketing arena.

Here is a summary list. Make sure you go here to get detailed descriptions and ongoing updates.

Day 1

• Keynote: OpenSocial: Transport of Delights?
• Show us the money!
• The value of open social networks for widgets
• Media Transformative
• What does a widget campaign look like from an agency perspective?
• Widgets promoting widgets
• Widget platforms
• Widgets as an expression of application interfaces
• Are widget standards an oxymoron?
• Can widgets eat your Web site?: security issues

Day 2

• Keynote: Startups with widgets, widgets as startups
• eCommerce in widgets
• Mobile widgets
• Widgets as adverts: How do we go from here to there?
• Towards a long term widget strategy
• Tracking widgets in the wild
• Exploring the Web and desktop widget dichotomy
• Social Meaning In A Fragmented World: Can we come together in a Web that’s exploding?
• How we built a widget that can really interact with the users
• Enterprise widgets
• SEO with widgets
• Licensing and legal issues
• Design and UI for widgets

Ahh … April! Being a sports fan, I like to follow my Cleveland Indians. And no, that’s not an April Fool’s joke.

There was a time, several years ago, that I could launch a cool little widget from Yahoo! named Gamechannel, pick whatever baseball team I wanted and see live play-by-play info. I could even launch and watch multiple teams. Well, those days are sadly over.

There are several widgets today that feed you live score updates, but no play-by-play. There’s a cool baseball widget from Schmaps (Sports Schedule Maps) that lets you see stadiums, schedules, maps, etc. But there are absolutely no widgets today that offer play-by-play.

Yahoo! has morphed their great old Gamechannel widget into a full Gamechannel browser page. Very big. Very uncool.

Major League Baseball offers their Gameday big browser page, but no widgets, except for some phones– at a cost of $5.99 per month, or $19.99 for the season.

Major League Baseball is missing the widget boat, in a huge way. Can you imagine how many brand impressions they could get from good widgets? Can you imagine what a good MLB widget could do on Facebook, Netvibes, and others?

All is I have to say is WAKE UP MLB, and join the widget 21st century!

This morning Mike Jones, co-founder of the ad network Userplane.com, posted a concise list of key pointers to guide marketers before they launch a widget ad campaign:

“10 Tips to Widget-up Your Startup Brand“