Hooville

Enterprise Web 2.0 guru, Dion Hinchliffe has an awesome post describing the “do it yourself phenomenon” with widgets.

Here is a snippet (no pun intended) from his article was particularly interesting:

If you’re still playing the old single Web site game, aren’t using syndication strategically, and haven’t leveraged the entire Web as a platform for your content and services, changes are that you’re at a significant competitive disadvantage. Even the page views/advertising issues aren’t as big as expected. Widgets actually don’t take away from business models based on advertising, and in fact, can complement advertising viewership significantly.  

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My buddy Mike Jones from Userplane hit me up with a fantastic question, “what was the first widget ever created?” Sheesh Mike, I posted on that a long time ago! The mother of all widgets is the Guinness widget.

Seriously though, here is his post:

Readers – I have been asked “What was the FIRST web widget ever created” – my thoughts rolled back to the original hit counters – but I am eager to hear your opinions. If you have any thoughts on the first widgets for the web – please let me know!  

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I try to keep tirades to a minimum. But tonight I felt inspired. So for those of you that hate long posts, I apologize in advance. For those of you, however, that like to wax philosophic about the web, stick around. One caveat, do not read this as saying that Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 trends are mutually exclusive. Or, that the beginning of Web 3.0 means Web 2.0 is all out of juice. On the contrary, I believe that we have not even seen the brunt of Web 2.0. For some other perspectives, check out posts by Tim and Tim.  

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Carebadges is a phenomenal concept. With this service you can support your favorite cause (global warming, anti-war, etc) by creating a new web-badge for your favorite social network, blog, or website. This badge not only tells your visitors about your cause, but also shows them the real-time impact ($$$) that the badge has had on your cause. If your cause is not listed on the Carebadge website, you can kick-start your own.

Carebadges is the brain child of Saar Gur. Saar is a stealth ninja that has been involved with efforts such as RockYou, GigaOm, and BrightRoll. Pretty smart dude, eh? Here is a little tid-bit from their web site:  

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Just as start pages are enabling users to export widgets outside of their environments, other content aggregation platforms are now enabling users to import widgets into their environments. Wetpaint is officially the first of the Wiki platforms to announce widget-friendly functionality. Via Pete at Mashable:

“On Tuesday (today, for many of you), the wiki service Wetpaint is announcing a series of new features…the most interesting new feature to me is Wetpaint Widgets. This feature means you can now add YouTube and Google Video players, Vizu polls, Google Calendars, Photobucket slideshows, Meebo IM widgets, Gabbly chat and RSS feeds to your wiki. Additionally, you can add any widget that uses the “embed” or “iframe” tags. After testing this, we’re left wondering why every wiki doesn’t support widgets…”  

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Fellow widgi-geeks,

Sorry for the lack of posts. I have been slammed recently with that whole “work thing.”

Anyhoo, I figured some of you might have been as slammed as I was the last week, so here is the run down on some recent news in the widgetsphere..

Fred Wilson on embeds – syndication is the shizzel.

Widgets make you rich – the importance of the MyBlogLog widget

Widgets going mainstream – Mossberg on Netvibes.

My buddy Pat Coyle gets some love from Steve Rubel – Congrats guys!  

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