Hey Everybody,

I wrote this story on Widgets for a magazine that the company I work for puts out called Thinking. I have not been able to find a single source of a good definition of widgets for laypeople. I also had kind of a tough time finding usable stats. Hopefully you will find this article a source for both.

Widget Works.

Widgets, badges, gadgets or mini-applications; call them what you will, but their use on social networking sites, blogs, desktops and personal Web sites has grown tremendously in the last year. Their increase in use and popularity relies on online “word of mouth” or recommendations by friends or trusted sources.

In the last year, Bozell has built a few widgets that we are particularly proud of. The first is a news aggregating application for the NCAA Men’s College World Series Web site, www.cwsomaha.com. We have also produced two widgets for the Mooney Airplane Company: one is a news aggregator and the other allows Mooney Airplane owners to share their news, photos and more from the Mooney site on their personal blogs or Web pages. See these widgets in action at www.mooney.com.

How Widgets Work:
Widgets are self-contained pieces of code. The code acts like a set of instructions telling your computer to perform a small task. This task can range from playing a game to aggregating news to showing Youtube videos. These code instructions, widgets, are free to use, so anyone can copy the code and move it into, out of and around their blog, profile or Web site. They are also available on social networking sites such as Facebook (66 million users), MySpace (110 million users) and Bebo. Users can download, customize, and forward to a single pal or an entire contact list with one click of a mouse.

According to Search Engine News, usefulness is the heart of a widget. Widgets give their users a new way to experience the Web and to interact with content. Instead of going out to a Web site to get a bit of information they need, users can check their widgets. Want to know the weather? Check your Weatherbug. Want the latest news? There are tons of widgets that can give you news from various sites. Forbes recently created and began promoting eight widgets that provide content from its site on topics that include technology, breaking news, business, stocks and lifestyle. The Washington Post offers a similar service. No need to go search for this information. With a widget, the information is brought directly to your profile page or blog.

Why Widgets Work:
Widgets boast some other very cool aspects for both their users and their creators. They’re very viral; their mobility makes them easy to share, and when made correctly, they’re useful, providing information or entertainment a user genuinely wants. And they can also be a way to promote your site and your brand.

Widgets allow a company to couple their brand with a game or service that highlights the service or image of their company. This coupling instills a sense of correlation between the user and the company through the widget. For example, Forbes widgets bring news data right to your blog. If users are unfamiliar with Forbes, the print publication, but they use and enjoy the widget, then they will at least correlate Forbes with news. Widgets provide a targeted form of advertising that is in itself a service. This correlation of brand and service can be effective for almost any industry because developers can build any variety of games or services into widgets.

Widgets Working Well:

-This year, eMarketer projects that 2008 U.S. Web widget ad spending will reach $40 million.

-A leader in measuring the digital world, comScore, reported in April of 2007 that 40.3 percent of Internet users in North America visited a Web site with an embedded widget.

-In 2000, WeatherBug, a very small widget program that sits on users’ desktops and does one simple thing – tell the weather – was released. In its first eight months, more than 1.5 million users downloaded it. Today, more than 65 million people have registered for the WeatherBug service.

-Sony Pictures promoted the release of their movie, Resident Evil, with a sweepstakes tied to widget developer, RockYou’s, very popular Zombies application. Sony anticipated nearly 10,000 entrants and received over 1 million entrants.

Right now, many of the widget-use success stories are anecdotal. But, they do present some interesting alternatives to traditional advertising. Beyond the initial cost of building and submitting the widget to Web sites and networks, there are very few upkeep costs in widget promotion. A widget’s lifespan and reach is limited only by the amount of interest that it can create. A widget will exist for as long as users use or enjoy its service. The long lifetime of widgets, their potentially low upkeep costs and an online trend toward open interfaces for developers will likely lead to a strong future for widgets.

Thanks for reading and enjoy everybody.

Will

The purpose of this blog is to illuminate business opportunities for media concerns. To show where money has been left on the table. Think Tom Cruise and “show me the money!” I’m specifically interested in outlining new revenue models driven by new technologies. I’m not sure that I accomplished that in this week’s forecast due to a good dose of gloom and doom. I’m determined to take a lighter approach to the recap! The good news is this: there is tremendous financial opportunity for media, content creators, artists, businesses and communities in connecting these dots.

It’s the Media (Stupid) Redux:

Clarification: “loss leader” = a pricing strategy

I’ve had some intriguing conversations this week with intellectual property owners: writers, directors, musicians, producers. They know that they are part of valuable market segments, niches, sub culture affiliates; yes, the long tail. Familiarize yourself with “The Long Tail” when you get a chance. It’s not new, but it’s very relevant to technology and business. My interpretation of the theory is that basically, the concept of scale has been redefined. You don’t need to sell massive amounts of one product to be profitable. There is pint up demand for specialized goods and services on the local level that up until now, we’ve had no way to supply. Technology provides a distribution channel to accomodate or supply that demand.

The economics behind the long tail are real. Google is proof of that. Google is the distribution channel that supplies the demand for local advertising. A 67% increase in total revenues last quarter – brilliant! A $3.2 billion bullseye on Google’s forehead – bummer! Viacom smells new money in the long tail.

So, back to the intellectual property owners and entities that actually create products. I’m convinced now more than ever about the impact of technologies like YouTube and Google for these guys. It’s really very exciting. I think that the entities that actually create products, the content creators have an obvious advantage over those that promote & distribute products. Viacom is playing this card with Google. The irony is that this conversation should not be between Viacom and Google. It should be between Jon Stewart and YouTube.

On the Starbucks & Paul McCartney deal, I say brilliant! There is no more Tower Records, Barnes & Noble’s music selection has always been short on selection, Best Buy’s music selection is morphing into a DVD sale rack. So cheers to Sir Paul! He’s correctly identified a great distribution outlet targeted specifically to his audience.

Subprime Submessage:

Don’t have a lot to say regarding the subprime market but that it continues to dominate the financial news. The upshot is if you’re looking to buy, you’re going to have a fantastic selection to chose from by the end of the year!

Rise of the Widgets: What Exactly is a Widget?

It’s a popular term in Internet jargon that refers to a box or module on your computer screen that allows you to multi-task and/or personalizes your computer screen. For instance, you may have your employer’s website up on your work homescreen, but a small widget, like Google Desktop, embedded in one of the corners that allows you to see weather, news and IM someone. My cool widget of the week is from Evoca. You can basically create a podcast and publish it from your cell phone.

Is The Secret Really A Secret?:

I love the Royal Bank of Scotland “Make It Happen” commercials. I think they’ve hit it the nail on the head when it comes to “The Secret,” pop culture’s most recent self help trend, hype, promotion, Top 10, solution… Positive thoughts are very powerful, but only when they are followed by deliberate action. Example: If you’ve got one of those ARMs and your mortgage payment is set to balloon – REFINANCE NOW!!! I haven’t read The Secret but I can pretty much agree with that. Gotta give The Secret camp an A+ for marketing; it’s everywhere (even this blog…). But I do I hope that their customers can separate the marketing from the product. Watch the RBS commercials and you can bypass the secret.

The Barter System on the web is really picking up steam. www.paperbackswap.com is apparently all the rave with avid readers. The owners have developed quite a cool community of readers sharing the book love. It’s also a profitable business model, which I imagine is a breath of fresh air for the publishing community. Maybe they should expand on that.

Multi-level marketing is the new crack, repackaged in the Internet age (see Burnlounge) for middle America.