Widgify

Conference season, conference season. How we love the conferences. I will be a keynote speaker at the WidgetWebExpo in NYC this year. The conference is being held June 16-17.

Here is the scoop:

Extend and optimize your marketing through web, mobile and desktop Widgets

* Learn from major agencies, widget tool vendors, developers and media groups who are using widgets on the web and on mobile, desktop and other platforms.
* Map out your widget strategy from a commercial and technical perspective
* Whether you are a widget maker or a widget user, this is the place to learn, to share and to become inspired.

Give me a shout if you are around NYC and want to talk geek. Should be a great show!

Via Kara Swisher at All Things D, Ted Leonsis chats about the fall of portals and rise of the distributed web. For more of his thoughts, check out his blog, Ted’s Take. Happy Friday.

Via Techcrunch:

Pageflakes, an Ajax home page service that originally launched in Germany in late 2005, has been acquired by Los Angeles based Live Universe, sources tell us. The deal has not yet been announced, and both Live Universe and Pageflakes refuse to comment.

It seems Om was not that far off. This is particularly interesting given the recent acquisition of Revver by LiveUniverse.

technorati tags: pageflakes, liveuniverse, widgets

The more times this widget gets grabbed and the video gets watched, the more trees get planted! So grab the widget below by clicking the ‘grab it’ link, or grab one of the other widgets listed below. Would appreciate any ideas, or help. This is a great cause.

More via Justin Thorp:

I can now say that if you love the environment, you need to use widgets. ABC and the Arbor Day Foundation have teamed up for a sweet campaign.

ABC has picked nine of their television show widgets that use Clearspring Launchpad. The widgets contain video trailers for upcoming episodes of their shows.

Every 10 times a video is watched in the widget, a tree sapling will be planted. This is all tracked using our analytics & reporting functionality via the widget console.

Use the ABC widgets, watch the videos, and trees will be planted. It’s that easy.

The participating ABC widgets are:

* Dancing with Stars
* LOST
* Squeegees
* Brothers & Sisters
* Desperate Housewives
* Grey’s Anatomy
* Ugly Betty
* Samantha Who?
* Bachelor

For more on this fantastic story, click here. GO ABC! Helping environment == cool.

technorati tags: widget, abc, arborday, environment, clearspring

S&N has announced that it will now be adding widgets to lager cans. Via Morning Advertiser:

The new cans will be available from 14 April and the lagers are said to taste closer to draught versions that are served in pubs than the existing canned products that are available….The new lagers will sell at a premium of around 15% compared with the non-widget versions.

This is a big step for the widget industry. And, as you can see, widgets add clear value to all products. For those of you that are history buffs, widgets have a long-standing relationship with alcohol. For more, see an old school post here.

technorati tags: widgets, beer, guiness

I usually don’t buzz on Clearspring, but I am feeling saucy. So here are some fun quotes from today:

Justin covers for Hoo @ Ajaxworld. This has been the year of the conference for the gang, but we are having a great time and getting some love. Via Internet News:

Clearspring offers the promise of a write once run anywhere widget platform. So instead of having to write different widgets for different sites you just do it once and get one click viral distribution.

Sounds neat doesn’t it?

For the last two years we have been working with a ton of media companies executing hundreds of campaigns for well over 100 major brands like NBC Disney, NFL, Paramount and more. We have done a ton of work, in particular, working with movie studios like our friends at Paramount. These guys have been amazing partners and our project for the upcoming Indiana Jones movie (WHICH IS GOING TO RULE) got some love via Reuters:

Paramount turned to widget provider Clearspring for “Skull,” and will offer a contest with the release of the second trailer. The two fans who manage to distribute their “Skull” widgets most will win trips to the world premiere of the movie and the chance to be red-carpet correspondents in footage that will be streamed onto the “Skull” widgets after the premiere.

p.s. Thanks to my man, Justin, for covering for me at AjaxWorld. I had to miss it, but he apparently did a great job at an amazing conference.

I will be back in NYC this week to speak at AjaxWorld. Last year I spoke about the Rise of the Social Aggregator. This year I will be continuing that discussion and discuss the role of widgets in catalyzing the development of the web as a platform. It should be interesting given all the fun stuff that happened over the last year and the recent discussion around Web 3.0 (also hit this last year). If you are in the city and have some cycles come say hi.

technorati tags: ajaxworld, hoomanradfar, clearspring, socialaggregator

I stumbled on a great new widget blog via our friend Ivan from Snipperoo.

As it happens, one of the most recent posts features one of our analytics geeks from Clearspring, Jodi, and her work on standardization.

Congrats to Al Merkrebs on some great work. I just updated the good old sidebar!

This was an interesting week. Although the big story was AOL’s acquisition of Bebo, another story was brewing. There was another story brewing, with perhaps even larger implications, the semantic web is rising - fast.

Via TechCrunch:

Yahoo’s support for semantic web standards like RDF and microformats is exactly the incentive websites need to adopt them. Instead of semantic silos scattered across the Web (think Twine), Yahoo will be pulling all the semantic information together when available, as a search engine should. Until now, there were few applications that demanded properly structured data from third parties. That changes today.

For those of you that are not familiar with the concept of the Semantic Web, the basic idea is to transform the web into a platform for structured data services. Instead of a developer having to write scripts to scrape pages and/or develop sophisticated machine learning algorithms to retrieve data, they can simply call structured APIs and be SURE that they are gathering the right data. This change would result in the ability for developers to create a new breed of intelligent applications that would rock the web as we know it.

This was our vision when we started Clearspring back in 2004 out of graduate school. We wanted the web to be a platform for services that could be remixed by users around the world without any programming. At the time, REST services were at a nascent stage. ProgrammableWeb was not around. Widgets were something geeks used with Konfabulator. Web 2.0 was a sexy jump start to the revolution. Ironically, many folks thought this was just a fad and did not see the relationship between the SemWeb and Web 2.0. This is an excerpt from a post in 2005 I wrote on the topic.

For all those people that think that there is this vast difference between Web 2.0 and Semantic Web I have a message for you. The reason people are at battle over the two seemingly opposing philosophies is simple–semantics. Figure out what Web 2.0 really means. Figure out what Semantic Web technologies can accomplish. Forget the Scientific American article by TBL and think about the next steps that we need to take to accomplish the dream of Web 2.0.

Early on in our history, we focused much more on developing semantic web infrastructure. Given market conditions, we focused on creating end-user tools - widget platform - to encourage the adoption of web services and break the web into pieces. Now, it seems, the web is almost ready for the big dance. Every site is breaking apart into web services, widgets and applications. The announcement by the biggest widget-creator out there, YouTube, of their new API platform is a confirmation of this trend. But it is not just about separating applications from data. The Facebook crew officially jump-started the revolution to free personal information. Specifically, information about user activities, user profile data, and - of course - the ever popular social graph is now quickly being freed from the grips of major silos. This is the spirit of Web 2.0 - the atomization of the web. As Steve Rubel says, the future of the web is web services, not web pages.

As with any revolution of this magnitude, there has been a veritable explosion in new applications and services. The remixing phenomenon has magnified this effort by opening the doors to all types of new services. Although this provides the user with more choice - which is great - the state of browsing has not advanced commensurately with the growth of new services and data.

Where does that leave the user? OVERWHELMED. What do we need to do when we get overwhelmed? Get organized. One way of doing that is to develop new interfaces to sift through data. CoolIris and others are rising to the occasion to try to solve those types of problems. But the other thing that is necessary is to actually organize data and services. And that pain point, my friends, is what Semantic Web Technologies are all about.

Pioneers like Metawebs, Radar Networks and - of course - my friends at AdaptiveBlue have been hard at work building tools in this space aggressively. Metawebs is building a massive semantic storage system, Radar is building a personal organization tool, and AdaptiveBlue has built some amazing services deployed as widgets that smartly aggregate commerce and other services from around the web.

Web 2.0 is about the web breaking into pieces. Web 3.0 - the Semantic Web - will put it all back together.

technorati tags web2.0, web3.0, semanticweb, hooman radfar, clearspring

For those of you in the circuit, it has been conference madness recently. It seems like a week does not go by without one. Here a couple fun one’s that I have been in involved with recently:

- CES
- Sports Marketing 2.0
- Graphing Social West

Since I hate to break a streak, I figured why not keep at it!

If you you happen to be in NYC this Wednesday, visit my panel “Widgets as a Platform: Content, Commerce, Communications” at Digital Hollywood in NYC. There are some really amazing folks in the social media space participating including:

- Lance Tokuda (Founder/CEO, RockYou)
- Dan Riess (VP Marketing and Ad Solutions, Turner)
- Eric Alterman (Founder/Chairman, KickApps)
- Kevin Freeman (VP Finance/Ops, Slide)
- Ori Soen (Founder/CEO, Musestorm)

See abstract below:

Now there is a new expression, The Widget Economy. For the uninitiated, the widget is miniature application or website that resides as a component element on a user’s desktop, social media page or mobile device. A button on a user desktop may open multiple widgets, so that in a flash, mini-apps open on the desktop to reveal up-to-the minute stocks, the weather, airline arrivals, a dictionary, your photo album – virtually anything, any data type - can be formatted into a widget and placed on your desktop. Once the user gets the hang of it, life without widgets is impossible. Widgets are as addictive as email. Widgets are your mini-obsessions managed and delivered as desired. Add in a layer of commerce and you have a fully featured platform. Watch out! Widgets are Here!

technorati tags: widgets, digitalhollywood, socialmedia, hoomanradfar