Hooville

A couple folks caught wind of the fact that Clearspring is working with Akamai. So I figured it might be a good time to shed some light on this bad boy…

In case you missed it, Akamai is getting into widgets in a big way with their StreamOS product. StreamOS is a rich media content management system. As you can imagine, many of their customers want to syndicate that content via widgets. According to CNET:

“People can make widgets with changing video to use with their desktop or MySpace page, as long as the content provider allows it in its distribution rules.  

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Big media has stepped up the online video game with NBCU and Fox announcing a new joint-venture to counter YouTube. Peter Chernin of Fox claims that, “At launch, this will be the largest advertising platform on Earth.”

Mike Hirshland thinks that this is a good thing. And, of course Mike Arrington has had a field day with this one – posting about the rumor, notes from the analyst briefing, and even the name of the venture. Apparently folks at Google call it “Clown-Co.” Now that’s not nice. What happened to do no evil, guys?  

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It looks like it is about that time of year. March Madness is upon us. And, like all widget-dorks, we just had to have a widget to keep track of the tournament.

So, Clearspring teamed up with our friends at College Sports Television (a CBS company) to get it done. You can get it here (see below) by clicking the (you guessed it) “Grab it” button. You can also check it out alongside it’s friendly desktop cousin at the CSTV website.

Expect a lot more coming from CBS soon…  

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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.  

Read more... (118 words, 1 image, estimated 28 secs reading time)