A friend of mine asked me if I knew of any good job-finding widgets. The question sent me on a search.

The first one I found was a winner: the Simply Hired widget. It has all the essentials for good, easy job searching.

The widget allows you to search for jobs using your choice of search words in any U.S. location. You can assign any mileage radius around that location, and to search the entire U.S., just leave the location and radius fields empty. The widget saves your searches so you can access any of your searches quickly form the Menu button.

The widget is based on the same job search engine used at the simplyhired.com site.

See a real-world example of the widget in my sidebar on the right-hand-column of this page. Feel free to use it. And good luck with your job search.

P.S. Don’t miss the “Panic” button.

Pros: Not only embeddable to Web pages, but can also be installed as a desktop widget.
Cons: Search is currently limited to the U.S. only. Canada is said to be added soon. It’s not clear that you can single-click any search result to open it. It’s also not clear that to get the desktop widget, after downloading the SpringWidgets platform, you need to find the Simply HIred widget in their Widget Gallery, click the Options button and select the Desktop icon.
Coolness factor: 4/5
Platform required: None, if it will be used on a Web page. As a desktop widget, requires the SpringWidgets downloadable platform (see below).
Get the Web-based widget from SpringWidgets: here
Get the desktop-based platform and widget from SpringWidgets: here

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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.

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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.

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There are still a thick handful of analog publications we rely on, including Newsweek, which lands in our snail mail box every Tuesday.

If you’re like us, we first flip through the pages to find one of our favorite Newsweek features: “Conventional Wisdom.”

Conventional Wisdom offers a take on the hottest newsmakers and headline grabbers in the worlds of entertainment, media, politics, news, business… the world at-large. Newsweek calls it a “distillation of the ever-changing thinking of beltway pundits and the chattering classes.”
 
But there’s no need to thumb through magazine pages to find it.

Just use the widget, fresh with daily “wisdom” and ready to install.

And if conventional wisdom is not your interest, Newsweek offers several other widgets that provide coverage on discreet areas, such as technology and science, health, international news and top ten stories of the week.

Pros: Easy to install to a number of social sites or embeddable to a Web page.

Cons: Not available as a desktop widget, unless you use a tool like Amnesty Cube to convert it to desktop form.

Coolness factor: 4/5

Engine required: None. Can be “uploaded” to a large number of social sites, or embedded into any web page.

Get the widget: here

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This story was reported by Dan Farber last night on Webware.

“Netvibes, a developer of customizable start pages, plans to make its widget platform, application programming interfaces, and iPhone version open source,” according to CEO Tariq Krim.

Farber’s full story can be read here.

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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…

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This morning chip giant Intel publicly rolled out Mash Maker, a browser plugin that allows users to easily customize any Web page by clicking and inserting widgets onto the page.

The question is why would Intel enter this arena, when similar mash tools, like Yahoo! Pipes and Microsoft Popfly, have been out for a while?

Eariler this month, Intel VP of Research Andrew A. Chien presented a paper entitled, “Live Large; Everyday Sensing and Perception,” which described Intel’s “Carry Small, Live Large” research initiative.

This initiative focuses on Intel’s development of Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) that “will be more aware of their users and context in everyday activities and environments, with sensors and inference,” according to Chien.

At this presentation, Chien highlighted “a mobile-sensing platform, designed to act as a fitness device with a multitude of data-reporting,” which, he said, “fell under the banner of human activity recognition.” (See this article.)

So where does Mash Maker fit into all of this?

Mash Maker may be providing Intel with early data on human activity and environments. We note that Mash Maker cannot run without logging in the first time. It remembers your login after that. So, is Intel collecting our activity data, hoping to use it in its MID development?

The connection may be plausible, since during his MID presentation Chien referenced what became today’s release of Mash Maker.

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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…

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Bitty Browser, from Bitty.com, is a miniature browser embedded into a Web page. It’s called Picture-in-Picture for the Web.

Why would you want to do something like this? Two good reasons:

1. As a marketer, you can distribute this widget with your brand set as the home page. Whenever the customer opens the page with the widget on it, your branded home page is right there.

2. As a user, you can do some quick browsing without leaving the page you’re already on.

It’s a win-win situation.

Play with my Bitty Browser here. It’s engaging and every time you come to this page, you’ll be seeing my brand.

Pros: Fully customizable; easy to install; can browse without leaving the page you’re on.

Cons: Marketers need to strategize distribution; too many linkbacks to bitty.com; for user, browsing can involve more scrolling than desirable.

Coolness factor: 4/5

Engine required: None. The widget is either uploaded to a social site or manually embeddable.

Get the widget here: Bitty Browser

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