Widgets News & Articles

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.

Glam Media has announced the Glam Apps Platform, a new, open-source application-maker that is cross-platform and can be monetized with embedded advertizing.

This extremely cunning model enables the building of apps that can be priced or monetized with advertising from multiple sources. The Platform is designed (presumably) for mashing content from the Glam Network, but as it’s open source, this is great news for everyone. In any case, the Glam Network is huge. Still in private Beta, you can apply for an invite to the developers resource at the link below.

Although they are still growing in use and popularity, widgets are not new to the web. Something that is new is the ability to easily create your own flash based widgets without needing to know a lot of action script or other code base. This is where Sprout Builder comes in…

In this guide we show you how anyone can build and embed simple web widgets.

It’s free, extremely easy and takes about five minutes to roll out your first creation. One of the best things about widgets is that you can enable sharing. Sharing widgets means more mashing of your ideas and content. More mashing means more community and more buzz around your brainchildren. For those who love to play and live in the WWW sandbox, this article is for you.

There are a number of ways to get targeted news, relevant to your niche, to your website. We’ve tried most of them, and the new NewsBar Wizard from Google News AJAX Search API is easily the best to date.

Simply enter the keywords you want to show up in the feed, copy the code generated by Google, and embed it to your website. The result enables visitors to view the latest headlines from each of the listed terms at a glance, and click quickly between news for the various search terms. The widget displays the results without any heavy-handed branding, flashy effects, or unnecessary load times. In short, it’s Google doing what it does best — giving us unparalled results faster than anyone else.

We show you exactly how to embed this fantastic new capability onto a WordPress -driven website, but the principle will be largely the same for most other content management and blogging platforms (if you use static html, it’ll be easier again). It’s a CPP situation (copy javascript, paste, pray…). You know the kind.

Here’s where to get the Google NewsBar Wizard.

And here’s the full lowdown, with embedding directions:

There are innumerable ways to add content to a website. One way is the use of widgets. What is a widget? How do you use them? Where can you use them? These are questions that led to endless hours researching on the internet.

Today the widget-Wonkas over at JS-Kit debuted Navigator, a web service that “distills” community opinion and user behavior (TWO DIFFERENT THINGS!) into a set of moderate-able and actionable site content views.

This yields two separate benefits:

• Site managers can alter the service’s look and feel based on two different forms of data (what users say they want, and what they actually do)
• Regular visitors get quick access to content attuned to their personal preferences (whether they know it or not)