Widgets News & Articles

One way of making a website more interactive and up-to-date is by pulling content from other, relevant sources. While content aggregation is one thing, adding a social dimension to content mash-ups will make things more interesting. Popular social bookmarking site StumbleUpon (news, site) has launched an application that makes such sharing of content easier through widgets.

Among the 7 Ways to Blog Using Your Mobile Phone, which we wrote back in 2009, a few of them included emailing your posts directly to your blog. But what if everything you wrote, posted and created came only from your email? Well, then you’d have Posterous.

Twelve months, €900,000 in research and a whole lot of feedback from its partners through its recently launched extranet and Irish-based TERMINALFOUR (news, site)  has a completely new edition of its enterprise grade web content management system.

Mashups may be all the rage, but can expose the enterprise to all manner of security risks. Enter the OpenAjax Alliance (news, site) and its new standard for more secure mashing.

Swedish content management provider Polopoly (news, site) has announced that it has integrated U.S. digital media giant’s Text Mining engine into Polopoly CMS 9.13.

Hardly a surprise given that Atex bought Polopoly last year with the specific intention of increasing its revenue directly from digital media (as opposed to software) to 50% of entire revenues by 2011.

With Polopoly v9.13 they may well meet that target, as the text mining solution should prove attractive to publishers with a lot of digital content lying around that could be making money for them if they could only get it organized.

iGoogle (news, site) is Google's personalized portal home page and is making itself more relevant to Web user's needs by adding a bunch of new social Web features.

If anyone was in any doubt that competition in the mobile web market is really beginning to heat-up, then yesterday’s release of three new widgets by Nokia (news, site) that will convert web code and scripts created on PCs into mobile applications will fix that.

Possibly concerned that it might be losing out in the battle to win the hearts -- and pockets -- of a market that is increasingly looking to the mobile web, Nokia is hoping these widgets will attract web developers to extend content to the Nokia platform.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Surprise! Twitter Has a High Churn Rate
• W3C Releases Standardized Widgets 1.0 APIs and Events
• Do You Twitter At Work? Hide It!
• Your Company May Need A Social Networking Policy

Today, Open Text (news, site) announced yet another acquisition. Not as material as some of the previous ones, this one falls in a different category -- a quest for "sizzling technology."

This time around, it's the Toronto-based Vizible Corporation, a maker of 3D technology and digital media interface solutions.

We talked to Scott Bowen, president of Open Text's Digital Media Group, to get the scoop on this deal.

It's going to be an interesting Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco next week. Among the announcements, you can expect to hear from IGLOO Software. At the conference they will be unveiling their new framework for building community solutions.

The new Online Community Platform has four primary components to it including:

• Theme Manager: Control the brand of your community through layouts and design.
• Global Configuration Panel: Turn applications on and off
• Widget Manager: Drag and drop capability as well as create and configure custom built widgets
• Open API's: Integration with other applications and solutions including CRM, ERP and cloud-based solutions such as Salesforce.com and Google Gadgets.

IGLOO is banking on their Open API's and widget based architecture to push their Online Community Platform to the forefront as it will enable organizations to get a community up and running quickly. Integration with key third party content and applications will also contribute to its ability to deliver. After all, it's clear that a community that operates in a silo does not add advantage to an organization.

"The new platform is all about flexibility and modular applications that enable interconnected networks of teams and individuals within an organization to work together more efficiently and effectively," says David Shak, VP of Platform Development for IGLOO Inc.

Want to see how easy their framework is to use? Watch this video or read the presentation.

Earlier this month, publishers from all over gathered at O'Reilly Tools of Change conference for publishers in New York City.  What you might think would be a dismal, disheartened group, instead turned out to be inspired industry professionals. With more attendees than last year, TOC honed in on the pulse of web publishing, beating steadily and heartily, as ever.  The participants were excited and anxious, but more importantly they were hopeful.

Impelsys, an online global publisher, was among those at TOC and they, too felt the invigorated spirit. Last week, we reported that Impelsys had just signed more than 150 publishers to their web publishing portal, iPublish Central. This week we caught up with Sameer Shariff, founder and CEO of Impelsys to talk about its successes and future in the publishing industry.

Social media is one of the fastest growing marketing areas on the Internet today. It allows marketers and business owners to advertise and market in ways that were unheard of 5-10 years ago. Every major corporation (and many small businesses and start-ups) out there is currently using social media.

The problem inherent with social media is the fact that a proper social media campaign can be extremely time-consuming, very costly and may require a large team of people. Let’s face it — most of us already know that there is an insane amount of sites, software, services and methods out there. A social media campaign can be exhausting. Enter Shoutlet, a tool that makes managing all your social marketing campaigns a snap.

Looking for ways to get its SiteCatalyst solution into the faces of ever more audiences, Omniture, provider of website analytics, announced the SiteCatalyst Widget.

SiteCatalyst is Omniture’s foundation product providing real-time web analytics for website and mobile solutions. They recently added to their product through the acquisition of some assets from search provider Mercado.

The widget enables you to share and publish SiteCatalyst reports, dashboard and bookmarks integrating the content into any type of application. Possibilities include iGoogle, the Google Toolbar, Windows Live websites, Yahoo! Desktop and just about any website or intranet that supports widgets.

Jim Sterne, founder of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit said, “With the SiteCatalyst Widget, Omniture is making Web analytics ubiquitous throughout businesses, allowing them to make more informed decisions.”

A smart move by Omniture as it helps put analytics into the eye of the business without forcing them to go into the full application and figure out how to use it. After all, it is the business who needs to see the information and make decisions related to how their websites are performing.

We wanted to see what a sample SiteCatalyst widget looked like in something like iGoogle or an intranet site, but alas, we are left to our imaginations.

The SiteCatalyst widget is definitely an enterprise offering, something Google should look into for their analytics solution.

What happens when you take Web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis, chat rooms, video conferencing and forums; mix them with a popular open-source CMS and apply this solution to the education environment?

This is exactly what Social Media Classroom (SMC) is doing in hopes of bringing two-way dialogue and interaction to the education field.

The Olympic athletes aren’t the only ones going for the Gold this August. Mochila hopes to set the “gold standard” for online distribution of Beijing 2008 Olympic news and feature content.

Mochila, best known for their massive online media marketplace that allows publishers access to quality photos, video and content, hopes that their newest initiative can aid publishers of all sizes by adding tremendous value to their websites with the latest in Olympic coverage, including articles, photos and video.