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 Gamedaybig 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!
Together with National Geographic, the webcast will share best practices for using widgets by showing marketers how to achieve greater customer interaction, higher page views and expanded ad sponsorship opportunities.
Some of the main topics will be:
Discover the differences between banner ads and widgets
Learn the top 5 strategies for creating widgets that deliver positive business results
See sample widgets and actual widget metric data from leading brand and media companies
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:
James Welch, Head of Research for JustSearch, was on the SEO panel described below, and gave a very well received presentation entitled “Gadget Ads: How could they work for you?” James has kindly made his PowerPoint presentation available for download here. ——————————– Original Post:
Would you believe that marketing people are beginning to proselytize about the use of widgets?
The buzz word “API” hit the news this week when Yahoo! decided to adopt the OpenSocial API, while big player Facebook remained a holdout.
Most people in the social network industry have a basic understanding of what API (Application Programming Interface) means.
It’s the software interface that allows an application, like a widget, to work in any given environment, like the different environments used by MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, etc. The widget needs to know the environment’s rules– its API– in order to function.
Now I’ve always wanted to dig a little deeper into how APIs really work, and I recently found an excellent article that takes the reader to the next level of understanding APIs.
If you want to go to that level, and are not afraid of learning more acronyms, Ryan Deschamps’ article “APIs: Who? What? Why? How?” is a must read.
You won’t become an API programmer, but you’ll be able to use the term with a knowing nod.
If you’re like me, you like to copy and paste. As a blogger, I’d like to share my clippings effortlessly, including those with multimedia content.
With the ClipCast widget from Clipmarks, you’re on the path to this ideal. The learning curve is steep and can take some time, but once you get the hang of it, it’s a good shortcut for clipping and sharing.
To use this widget, you’ll need to install their “Clip mode” button to your browser’s toolbar and put their widget on your site.
Then, when you are back to browsing online and see something you want to clip and share, click the “Clip mode” button on your browser’s toolbar to access the Clipmarks clipping tools. Once you’ve clipped something (text, pictures, video), you’ll have the option of saving it to your ClipCast widget or posting the ClipCast to your blog.
Voila! Your readers are now seeing what you deem as clip-worthy.
You can see a sample of ClipCast as a blog post, down below. Please make sure you also look at ClipCast as a widget, located in our right sidebar atthe very bottom.
Pros:
The widget itself is chock-full of neat interactive tools:
Add comments to clips
View clips with a slide-show button
View clips in auto-play mode
Vote for clips you like
The widget supports links and plays any video in a clip.
Cons:
My widget version is 200 pixels wide, which makes the back-arrow disappear. That means once you’ve cycled through all the clips, there’s no going back to the beginning without a screen refresh. Ouch!
The actual clipping of content itself can be very clunky until you get the hang of it.
The essential Clip mode button is only supported on IE, Firefox and Flock. Opera users are out of luck.
The Clipmarks online clip management system can be hard to figure out, e.g. I wanted to delete a second ClipCast I had made and I still can’t figure out how to do that.
You can’t select which of the ClipCast’s interactive tools are shown on the screen; all are always shown.
Engine required: None, but you need to install Clickmarks’ “Clip mode” button, and then embed the code for the widget.
At the close of the seven-day auction listing on eBay, the domain name “widgets.com” garnered $175,100 as a final bid, which was not enough to meet the unpublished reserve amount set for the sale.
In the end, 66 bids were placed by 28 bidders. During the last three hours of bidding time, the bids moved up less than $15,000, and any anticipated whirl of bidding activity did not materialize. The auction received a bunch of page views; the counter for the listing reached nearly 2900.
Whether “widgets.com” remains in the possession of its reported seller, Rick Schwartz, the self-named “Domain King,” who registered the domain in 1995 as one of thousands he owns, or behind-the-scenes dealings will mean the change of ownership, remains to be announced.
It is unclear whether the auction was about a businessman looking to seize the moment with a piece of hot Internet real estate as the digital world welcomes the burgeoning potential of widgets, or the efforts of a vocal pioneer domainer determined to call attention to his concerns about certain provisions of proposed legislation that will target and restrict commerce by the domain name industry.
So, for today, “widgets.com” remains a piece of Internet property subject to a higher bid and, we think, certain to make a news splash whenever it debuts in its next form.
Bidding on the “widgets.com” domain name auction on eBay has not been accelerating at the rate we expected. Does this mean something?
As of this moment, the bid price is $155,100 USD, and the auction is scheduled to close tomorrow morning, March 26, at 10:29:44 a.m. PDT.
At this rate, it’s possible that the owner’s reserve price will not be met and the sale will not happen. Then again, we all know that last minute bidding and sniping on eBay might jack the price up incredibly.
Stay tuned … We’ll post the outcome tomorrow morning.
By all accounts, FriendFeed is the aggregator du jour for getting ALL of your friends’ social feeds in one place. And all hot social sites offer their own widget, right?
Well, in one of the many FriendFeed discussions I was reading, I found someone asking about how good their widget was. So I went to look for it. Good luck trying to find it.
Seems that they had one and then removed it. After digging pretty deep, I finally found out that you can still get it, but you have to know the “secret” place. The treasure was revealed on the Blogoscoped blog: you get the embed code by using this URL: “http://friendfeed.com/embed?user=yourname” (replace “yourname” with your FriendFeed user name shortcut, like “john”).
There are very few people using the widget, but Paul Buchheit, co-founder of FriendFeed, is one of them. Turns out that Paul was the creator and lead developer of Gmail! You can see the widget on his blog, or my example of it here:
This is clearly a beta version of the widget.
The widget shows YOUR OWN social feeds, but NOT those of your friends. I suppose showing your feeds could be interesting to your blog readers, if they want to dig deeper into what YOU are doing.
I also discovered that FriendFeed has a Google group, with discussions of the widget and a few minor tips on how to customize the beta version.
If you are an early adopter of bleeding-edge stuff (and who among us isn’t?), you can be first on your block to actually show your friends the FriendFeed widget.
During my 24×7 surfing, I found a nice mention of our widgetBeat site on the German blog, “Exciting Commerce.”
Here is their complete comment:
“BTW: Neben Sexy Widget ist derzeit WidgetBeat das tonangebende Widget “Blog of the Moment.”
Loosely translated, it means, “BTW: Besides Sexy Widget, WidgetBeat is the pace-setting Widget ‘Blog of the Moment’.”
The positive attention is encouraging. We are flattered to be called “pace-setting,” but more importantly, we are dedicated to building “cred” in the widgetsphere and are working hard to earn every loyal reader we can. We do value all comments, so please join us with your input to our posts or contact us directly at info@widgetbeat.net.
And, as they say in Germany, “Danke vielmals!” to the Exciting Commerce blog.
What’s the worth of the domain name “widgets.com”? Well, the owner is putting that to the test.
For more than — likely much, much more than — $120,000 USD, you can be in the running to buy that domain name.
That’s the current bid on eBay for the seven-day auction listing, but surely the price will rise as the bidding for the name continues until the closing on the morning of March 26 PDT.
Why is the current owner selling? It all has to do with serious changes taking place in the domain-name-selling world. Find out more here.
Who’s bidding and who will end up owning the name? We don’t know. Right now the bidding names are being encrypted by eBay.
What will the winner end up doing with the name? That falls in the “wait and see” category.
What price will end up as the winning bid? Keep your eyes on widgetBeat for more. We’ll let you know about the winning bid, assuming that the final bid meets the seller’s unpublished reserve price.
Web analytics continue to grow and standardize, which is a great development for those of us in the widget world.
A panel at the eMetrics Summit in Toronto, Canada will be discussing the differences in web analytics versus audience measurement tools. Widget analyst Jodi McDermott, a member of the Web Analytics Association, is a panel participant.
Among numerous topics, the panel will discuss “… the value of the metrics, methods and tools used by web analytics practitioners, online advertising media and audience measurement organizations.”
Location: Marriott Eaton Centre Hotel
Toronto Ontario, Canada
Date: March 31, 2008
Would you like to spend a day rubbing elbows with social app experts?
Then the SNAP Summit 2.0 is the place to be next week. Along with a full day of talks and workshops, the event will be keynoted by Dave Morin, senior platform manager for Facebook.
The conference will debate questions such as:
* How do you make your apps more viral?
* What are the best ways to use metrics?
* Where is the social platform headed?
* What are some of the major exit strategies for app companies?
* What kind of apps do advertisers like most?
GigaOM is a media partner for the event and is offering their readers a 10 percent discount off registration by going here and entering the code “gigaom.”
Location: The Commonwealth Club
San Francisco, California, USA
Date: Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Hollywood Reporter’s Gail Schiller writes this morning that Paramount Pictures will be releasing their second “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” trailer as a widget this week.
The first “Skull” trailer was released in February and, according to Schiller, “racked up millions of views.” Paramount’s first-ever trailer widget was for “Cloverfield,” which benefited at the box office from their widget campaign.
Paramount is also using a series of 8-10 video widgets for the upcoming Mike Myers comedy, “The Love Guru.” Widget producer Clearspring has created all of Paramount’s widgets to-date.
The widgets have been distributed on Facebook, where
the Indiana Jones page presently has more than 19,000 “fans,” who spread the widgets by sharing them with their friends.
ad:tech has been producing exciting conferences for 10 years now. Their mission is to provide an “interactive” environment for both advertising people and technology people.
“Come learn about the types of widgets and gadgets (e.g., start page, desktop, social media), the platforms they run on (e.g., mobile, TV, gaming) and the interactive content that’s turning traditional online advertising on its head. Then, go a step further to understand the value of incorporating widgets and gadgets into your marketing plan and monetizing your efforts,” according to the panel’s description.
Take a look at this stellar list of panelists:
MODERATOR:
Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research
PANELISTS:
Hooman Radfar, CEO and Co-Founder, Clearspring
Jane Felice, Senior Client Service Director, Media and Entertainment, comScore, Inc.
Ed Davis, VP Product Development, ESPN Digital Media Community
Kent Schoen, Product Marketing Manager, Facebook
Just the opportunity to introduce yourself to one of these people will be worth the price of admission.
Location: Moscone Center
San Francisco, California, USA
Date: Tuesday, April 15, 2008 - Thursday, April 17, 2008
The creative folks at WidgetBox have found an inventive way to create traffic for their site: make a widget on their site and you become eligible for winning a MacBook Air.
I don’t know about you, but being a Mac enthusiast myself AND having Air envy, I would go to their site right now and start making widgets. If I wasn’t feeling some conflict of interest, I’d be all over it, but that shouldn’t stop you!
WidgetBox is calling this promotion “Widget Madness” (to coincide with NCAA basketball’s March Madness, perhaps?), and the dates for eligibility are March 18 (that’s today!) through April 11.
Be sure to watch this space for the winner’s announcement.
If you have a need for, or simply enjoy, tracking news trends on the Web, you’ll like this widget from Daylife. They are an online news site with outstanding page layouts and search functions, but it’s their news indexing feature that really grabbed my attention.
Daylife sets themselves apart by giving you the actual number of Internet articles on any given news topic. The service allows you to enter several topics of your choice for tracking data that quantifies how those topics stack up against each other. The data reflects the number of articles on the Internet on a this-week vs. last-week comparison. Raw numbers and trending scores reveal what’s hot and what seems to be cooling in the Internet news universe. It’s like seeing the results of a virtual popularity contest.
AND, Daylife offers a widget — the “News Index” widget — that does the same thing, for you to put on your Web pages. You build your own customized version of the widget (by adding news topics, or people in the news, etc., ), and then you are given the option of getting the code or uploading it to your choice of popular social sites.
I built a news index widget that compares the number of Internet articles about some of the popular social networks.
This widget will be very valuable for people like me, who do a lot of Web tracking. Or for people who just like to see the amount of news buzz that, say, Halle Berry’s baby is getting versus the Fed Reserve meeting.
Pros: Very easy to build and customize. Easy to see the numbers of stories for each topic, and their percentage of growth (or decline) from the previous week to the current week. When you click a story’s “more” button you are taken to Daylife’s very rich results page.
Cons: Only one or two recent stories can be seen, so clicking the “more” button is often another necessary click; it would be nice if they let you set the number of articles that pop down. Also, it’s not clear at first what happens when you click on any one of the rows. I thought I was clicking on individual items in the row, to get more details on the numbers and score, but all that happens is that the row pops down to reveal recent stories on the topic
Coolness factor: 3/5
Engine required: None. Just copy and paste code into your Web site, or follow instructions to insert into one of the popular social sites.
WidgetWebExpo 2008 is this year’s incarnation of Widgety Goodness, a hugely successful widget conference held last year in London. Anyone connected to the widget world will, or should be, at this year’s expo in New York City, June 16 and 17.
Founder and conference host Ivan Pope, known in the industry as “Mr. Widget,” has a wide range of cutting-edge sessions in store for this year’s expo. To name just a few:
Widgets Marketing for Beginners
Advanced Widget Tools
Widgets Marketing Case Studies
Social Networking Widgets
How Widgets are Changing Publishing
How Widgets are Changing Advertising
How Widgets are Changing Search
Measuring Widget Success
Viral Widgets
For a full list of topics planned to-date, link here and go to the bottom of that page.
At the expo, you’ll also be able to watch and enjoy the “Widget Effectiveness” awards and/or attend the Widget Standards Birds of a Feather (BoF) meeting.
Whether you’re new to widgets or have built your own, the WidgetWebExpo will be THE place to be and be seen this summer.
Location: New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge
Brooklyn, New York, USA
Date: Monday, June 16, 2008 - Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Jodi McDermott, aka “widgetgirl,” is one of the leaders in the Web analytics and widget analytics world. She’s an active member of the Web Analytics Association and is co-chairing a WAA subcommittee for drafting analytic standards for Web 2.0, including widget analytics.
Yesterday she posted the insightful article “Engagement with a widget” that reveals some of her thinking on how widget use on the Internet can be measured.
McDermott references “grab rates,” “shared rates,” “active rate vs. ‘churning off’ rate” and many others. She also breaks widgets into categories and offers specific metrics for each category.
The need for standard widget metrics is obviously huge. Big brands starting to use widget advertising are increasingly in search of meaningful metrics.
But she wisely concludes that “none of these metrics in isolation are going to answer the question of ‘What is your customer’s level of engagement?’ The metrics are simply a set of tools provided to help the widget creator analyze their content that is specific to their business goals and objectives.”
The field of widget analytics is an important area to keep our eyes on, and McDermott’s views are a good portal into it.
widgetBeat™ is dedicated to bringing you timely widget news and widget reviews, written by industry professionals. Think of us as THE place for all things widget. Your comments are most welcome.
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Ahh … April! Being a sports fan, I like to follow my Cleveland Indians. And no, that’s not an April Fool’s joke.
If you’re like me, you like to copy and paste. As a blogger, I’d like to share my clippings effortlessly, including those with multimedia content.
At the close of the seven-day auction listing on eBay, the domain name “widgets.com” garnered $175,100 as a final bid, which was not enough to meet the unpublished reserve amount set for the sale.
which benefited at the box office from their widget campaign.
“The Love Guru.” Widget producer 
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