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Widgets
Monday, April 21, 2008
WebShare weekend: Britannica initiative gets boost from TechCrunch
What a weekend.
It started quietly enough. I’ve been working with my client, Encyclopaedia Britannica, to prepare for the hard launch of its WebShare program, set for next Monday with the distribution of the official press release (to be accompanied, of course, by a social media version).
Tom Panelas, the director of Corporate Communications at Britannica, brought me in to help promote WebShare, which has two distinct purposes:
- Give free Britannica accounts to bloggers and other web publishers so they can use the site in their research, cite Britannica articles and provide selective access to Britannica through links in their posts to Britannica articles and widgets.
- Provide readers of these articles with access to Britannica articles without needing an account at all.
The program includes a variety of elements that strengthen the venerable encyclopedia’s first significant foray into the social media space. In addition to the linking program, there’s a blog, a Twitter account (to include a link of the day), widgets and “topic clusters,” collections of links to Britannica articles that relate to a current news story. For example, we put together a list of links that would be useful to anybody covering the Delta-Northwest airline merger the day that story broke.
Leading up to the launch, we’ve been quietly alerting people to the availability of the WebShare website and giving out some free accounts. Anybody visiting the site could register for a free account, as well. The primary targets of our outreach effort (Neville Hobson is helping me out with this) have been (and will continue to be) education-focused bloggers, library bloggers, and journalists. Many who live and work in these disciplines are restricted, right or wrong, from citing Wikipedia articles in their work, which led us to believe they would constitute a very interested group.
Some popular bloggers were also on my list, and on Friday evening, I went ahead and sent off a note to the first of these to Mike Arrington at TechCrunch. Mike reported on WebShare almost immediately, including some criticisms, and attracting over 100 comments (as of this writing). But positive or negative, Mike’s post opened the floodgates. Stories suddenly appeared in Mashable, C|Net, and some other top-flight blogs, as well as blogs written by librarians we had not yet contacted and scads of others. So far, 156 posts have been written about WebShare that link to the site; Technorati has assigned the site an authority of 80 and a rank of 110,846. Not bad for a site that had no links to it at all on Friday afternoon.
I’ve been archiving significant articles addressing the program on del.icio.us.
Tom and the folks at Britannica were prepared. They have received well over 1,000 registrations so far, and have been handling them all quickly. It’s a manual process, since each registration needs to be approved. We also put in work upfront to identify the inevitable criticisms Britannica would face:
- Britannica, with its 56,000 articles, can’t compete with Wikipedia, with over 100 million.
- Britannica’s business model is obsolete. The company must ultimately move to a wiki-based, open-source model.
- Despite the entry into social media, Britannica is still a one-way resource, not engaged in the conversation.
- WebShare is really just about getting lots of link love to boost Britannica’s visibility on Google.
The folks at Britannica are ready for these, and will be using the blog on the WebShare site to address these issues. The company’s president, Jorge Cauz, will be doing interviews with some bloggers, as well. It’s also nice that some comments—and some posts—take issue with these arguments and applaud Britannica’s efforts. (I was delighted to see my friend Brian Solis lauding the program, even though he had no idea I was working on it). And Tom has been jumping in as well, participating in some of the comment threads. (Tom, I’m sure, is exercising some restraint to avoid correcting people who are just wrong, like the one blogger who said that the company uses the old spelling of encyclopaedia in order to “sound more authoritative.” In fact, that’s been the spelling of the company’s name since it was founded in 1768.)
Meanwhile, I’ve spent much of my weekend identifying new posts and making recommendations about which ones should be addressed by a comment and which by a follow-up post on the Britannica site. A few follow-up posts will appear over the next few days.
A couple of key observations come out of the weekend experience:
- The A-listers count. Regardless of how much people say they trust friends, family members, and participants in their networks, people like Mike Arrington can still create a huge amount of awareness and generate a lot of buzz.
- It makes sense for companies to start small with initiatives in mind, but it pays to get the first bits right before moving on to others.
- If you’re going to do social media, do it. Rather than simply roll out the linking program, Britannica was very agreeable to adding dimensions of participation to the mix, including the blog and the Twitter account. This provides a platform for listening to feedback and participating in a conversation about the initiative, and maybe even tweaking it where it makes sense.
I’ll be back with more on the WebShare program as it rolls along.
Blogging • Social Media • Widgets • (1) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Sprout moves to public beta
If you need proof that widgets are popular with both publishers and viewers, take a look at Sprout, a Web app that lets you create sophisticated widgets with ease. (The widget that plays the latest episode of For Immediate Release, over on the right-hand side of this blog and wherever you, dear reader, choose to put it using the “share” code, took about 10 minutes to create using Sprout.) According to an email I received from the Sprout team, the private beta led 5,000 people to create 17,000 widgets that have been viewed by 11 million people.
Concurrent with the release of an upgrade to the application that responds to input from private beta users, Sprout has opened its doors and now is in public beta. It’s definitely worth your time to try out the service (particularly since it’s still free). More improvements are due in a month, including animations. The team also promises a way to remove the Sprout bar, the horizontal graphic attached to every widget that identifies it as a Sprout object. I suspect that’ll be part of a fee-based service, like getting Eudora email without the ads.
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Get the FIR widget!
I found a new service called Sprout that allows you to build a widget that plays multimedia, among a lot of other things. It’s remarkably easy to use, as I found out when I managed to get into the beta. It took about 10 minutes to build this widget, which plays the most current episode of FIR. As each episode is posted, I’ll just go into the widget builder and update the media link so it always plays the most recent episode. Just copy the embed code (click “share") and visitors to your site or blog can listen to FIR directly from your page. Pretty cool, huh?
Audio • For Immediate Release • Podcasting • Widgets • (9) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Widgets go mainstream
There was little agreement when, at the New Communications Forum in February, I declared 2007 "the year of the widget" (although it was covered in a few places, like here and here). Bryan Person figured I might be on to something when he reported on the first conference dedicated to widgets, WidgetCon, held last month in New York.
But surfing through TV channels last night, I saw the definitive proof that widgets have arrived.
Burned out from staring at the computer monitor all day, I took a half hour to kick back on the couch and relax. Nothing I usually like to watch was on, so I settled for Discovery Channel's recurring event, Shark Week. I sat up when I saw a crawl on the bottom of the screen letting viewers know they could get the Shark Week widget.
The widget includes three shark-related headlines (updated to stay current), links to a couple Shark Week online features ("Ask a Conservationist" and a feature that lets you assemble your own shark documentary, along the lines of the misguided Chevy Tahoe experiment but without the risk), a link to the Shark Week site, and a link that lets you add the widget to your own blog or website.
The widget is huge, as widgets go, expanding to fill whatever space is available, which may discourage some shark fantatics from adding it to their sites. Still, a Technorati search revealed 423 blogs specifically about sharks. I'd be willing to bet the widget has found its way onto some of those sites, among others. In any case, it's a sign -- to me, at least -- that widgets can be a relatively cheap way to get your content out onto the edge where your target audiences will be likely to see it.
Here's the widget (I got it to fit in a narrow width by putting it in a one-cell table):
Friday, April 20, 2007
Snap Shots: mouseover widgets
I tried Snap.com on this blog for a week or so and asked readers to give me feedback. I got one comment supporting the tool; all the rest hated it. They didn’t just dislike it or prefer my blog without it. They loathed it.
So I was skeptical when I read that Snap.com had introduced SnapShots, which turns links into widgets. They still work with mouseovers, but an icon indicates that a mouseover is available, making them easy to avoid. (The regular Snap.com feature produced a pop-up whenever you moused over any link, which is what drove people crazy.)
SnapShots provides live data from a website, which means you can consume anything from a YouTube video to a stock chart from directly within the pop-up. Since you can indicate that a pop-up is available—and restrict their use to only those links you want, rather than have every link pop up a window—it seems to be a far more useful feature.
There are eight SnapShot modules available right now, with more added regularly—one was just recently introduced that offers Reuters company news articles that delivers Reuters content about your publicly traded company. Others include summaries of Wikipedia entries (sort of an on-demand glossary), stock charts, YouTube videos, photo albums, Amazon.com product listings, and MP3 files.
Here are two examples, one of a a Youtube video showing one of the prototypes from the recently launched Coca-Cola Virtual Thirst desighn competition, the other a Wikipedia definition of “podcasting.”
Some additional coverage of Snapshots is here.