Conference host: Mr Widget

Well, Widgety Goodness is coming around again – but it’s now called WidgetWebExpo. It’s got bigger and better, with two days and two streams. This means we get to cover a lot more widgety goodness and to hear from more parts of our industry.

The next WidgetWebExpo will be in New York on June 16th and 17th this year. There will be a call for participants in the near future. We’ve got a lot of good stuff lined up for you. Watch this blog.

What are your faves? Contact Libby if you want to vote on one.

Here’s the Flickr group direct as not everyone has managed to tag their’s WGUK07. Prizes cannot be award to images without the tag.

Anyway.. enjoy! Still recovering here…

Flickr “Widgety Goodness” Images 

We have been involved recently with helping create Widgety Goodness UK 07, Europe’s first Widget conference, in Brighton at the Corn Exchange tomorrow.

Anyone participating in the WGUK07 Social Network will now have a chance to give their blog a boost.

Authentic Blogging has sponsored the event with a coaching session for two bloggers captured in the feed into the network on the day.

For those that aren’t up with this stuff yet, it’s really quite neat. Backnetwork provides a platform for social networks to build in the lead up to a conference or event, on the day and for some months afterwards. Delegates join with speakers, sponsors, media and organisers to answer each other’s questions and help set the focus for the event. During and after, they chat, think and debrief to make even more sense of what’s going on and move things forward in their worlds.

We’ve been facilitating this space since its inception.

So Graeme and I thought it would be nice to give something to the community of Widgety folk by sponsoring the prize for “Most Indepth Blog Post on the Day”.

Delegates will have their laptops there and, believe it or not, be tapping away to share what’s happening for them. To document and reflect. To download, store and retain it all in their “external memory drives” ie. their blogs.

…and propping up the bar at the After Party later on.. and chewing each other’s ear’s off no doubt.

It’s going to be a great day.

Good on you Ivan, Emm, Zoe, Kris, all the sponsors and speakers and punters for bringing it together. Can’t wait to share more about the wonders of widgets.

social network « Widgety Goodness

Of course one of the key reasons for attending Widgety Goodness is to network – express, connect, learn, create – with like-minded colleagues from across the industry. We’re hooking up with backnetwork to create the Widgety Goodness 07 Social Network.Not only do you get all this on The Day, but we’ll be bringing you, one and all, together in the leadup – and for 12 whole juicy months afterwards. Call it a learning community, call it a network, a bunch of widget fiends cooking up the future. But whatever you do, don’t miss out. This is a dedicated space for widget wonders to emerge.

When you register for the conference, you will be automatically subscribed and welcomed into the Greater Goodness. Infact, you become The Great and The Good of our very own micronation.

Platform 4

Platform 4 is keen to discover creative talent wherever it is emerging. And we recognise that some of the most inspiring online work is coming from the bedrooms of passionate hobbyist coders – not always the big name agencies and software giants.To recognise this trend we’re offering £1500 to the most creative mash-up of Channel 4’s Film4 RSS feeds. Two runners up will also get £250. You can find a list of these RSS feeds on the RSS Central page, and also listed below. We’ll create a gallery of all the mash-ups received that meet the judging criteria. The full guidelines of the competition, including how the projects will be judged and the timeframes for getting your entry into Platform 4, are outlined here.

Since we’re not going to be hosting these mash-ups, you’re free to develop them in whatever language you’re most familiar with, and deliver them as bite-size widgets or full-blown apps. If you’d like to pull in other Channel4 content into your app, refer to our RSS Central Page for some of our more popular content feeds. For more on what makes a good mash-up, and a list of hundreds of open APIs with which to mash-up the Film4 data, visit www.programmableweb.com.

As an example of the kind of application that can be created using the film site’s content, check out the Movie Tag Facebook application.

So the good folks of Livejournal have been sold on by their owner, Six Apart, to a Russian oberfuherer. No-one seems very concerned and it probably wont’ have any effect on the users – may even be beneficial. Who knows, they may even have a positive attitude to widgets. But it does raise questions about who owns the users.

LiveJournal & SUP

San Francisco, CA – December 3, 2007 – Six Apart, the world’s leading
independent blogging software and services company, today announced
that SUP, an international media company, has acquired LiveJournal
(LJ), the pioneer of social networking communities online used by
millions of people around the world to connect through personal
journals and topic-based communities. SUP has launched an American
company, LiveJournal, Inc., to manage and operate LiveJournal globally.Six Apart acquired LiveJournal in January 2005 from its founder, Brad Fitzpatrick. From its founding, LiveJournal popularized many of the fundamental innovations of social media, such as friends lists and powerful privacy controls.

Widgety Goodness afterparty with Techcrunch and the Brighton posse

Immediately following the event we will be holding a drinks reception in the same elegant building as the conference – a further opportunity for attendees to network, mingle and discuss the content of the day. This is sponsored by NixonMcInnes, Spannerworks, doof and bigmouthmedia in association with TechcrunchUK

 more… 

Widgety Goodness sponsor Channel4 is officially launching its Platform4 mash-up competition at the Widgety Goodness Conference on 6th December 2007. The competition is offering a cash prize of £1500 for the most creative mash-up or widget using Channel4’s Film4 RSS feeds. The competition has been created in recognition of the growing number of ‘hobbyist coders’ taking widget and application-making into their own hands. All mash-ups are being judged on creativity, quality, usability and “Channel4-ness”. For more information, go to the website. Let the mash-ups begin!

More…

We wanted our shirts to be classy, eco friendly and above all, wearable. We’re printing on these bamboo based shirts, sponsored by Platform 4. They look and feel wonderful and every participant gets one that will actually fit them.

Naturally sustainable BAMBOO is rapidly emerging into the fashion world. Fabric woven from bamboo yarn is light, almost translucent, and softer than cotton. It has a natural quality that feels like silk, but has the advantage of being machine-washable. This natural fibre is hypoallergenic, absorbent, and fast drying. It is naturally anti-bacterial and will not hold odour. Like other natural fibres, it allows the body to breathe as the fabric absorbs the perspiration away from the body. It also is the most sustainable of the natural fibres. It is fast-growing – the type of bamboo used for making fabric, commonly known as Moso, can reach a mature height of 75 feet in just 45 to 60 days. Because of its natural antibacterial properties, it needs no pesticides. This fabric is cooling in summer, warm in winter, and environmentally friendly all year round. Combined with 30% ORGANIC cotton, our BAMBOO fabric becomes softer than ever, has beautiful drape, and prints perfectly.

Widgety Goodness – a whole conference on the ephemera that is widgets. I love widgets, you can try stuff out for relatively low outlay and just see how it works.

Gasp – sorry about the title. There was no way we could let Ivan put this up himself (which he wouldn’t have, actually), but the rest of us couldn’t resist!

A feature story on The Sales Specialist about Ivan Pope, our main man behind Widgety Goodness. Ivan will be speaking at Widgety Goodness and has created the event, with much support from a very small team, plus much interest and support from sponsors, speakers and punters.

More about Ivan on wikipedia at Snipperoo and here.

Correction: Snipperoo was founded, not surprisingly, in 2006 not 1996.

Widgets are a part of life for the web now and what a good thing it is too. I’d love to see them get into the cultural sector more, but I guess it is just a matter of time.

Maybe I can speed this process up after I have been to the one day conference in Brighton this December 6th that is devoted to them.

The day is going to try and answer four good questions:

* what role do widgets play in online strategy?
* what tools are available for the development and distribution of widgets?
* what destinations do widgets go to and how do I get them there?
* how do I track and analyse widgets once they have left home?

Check it out.

If you are interested in a free ticket… let me know ….

We’re very pleased to announce that Matthew Trewhella, one of the engineers who’s worked very closely on OpenSocial, will be speaking at Widgety Goodness. His presentation will be “The Programmable Web”, and will cover the development of gadget applications and Web 2.0 and Google’s efforts in this space, including OpenSocial.

Our friends at TechcrunchUK are co-hosting the reception after Widgety Goodness, and we’re opening it up to the wider Brighton coder, hacker, development and entrepreneurial community for what promises to be a great meeting of minds. Watch this space for more details.

Visited the venue this morning to talk over details such as quality of snacks and reception drinks. It’s going to be great – and the venue will add to the general goodness of it.

Due to the hectic pace of selling tickets and bringing the event together, we are going to aggregate some key stories from speaker’s here, then they all get fed into our WG07 Social Network.

Here’s what keynote Chris Cunningham had to say today.

Are widgets over-hyped as a technology? As advertisers and marketers become more and more familiar with innovations available, what does the future hold for this particular marketing tool?

Here’s a nugget that came from an Instapoll of the audience during the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference last month: What trend is the most overhyped from the perspective of a major advertiser? 1. Widgets (31 percent)
2. Mobile platforms (30 percent)
3. Social networking (22 percent)
4. Paid search (11 percent)
5. Video (6 percent)

more…

Chris, if you’ve got a blog, please add it to your profile in the WG07 Social Network. Same goes for all you bloggers out there. Remember to use a tag that will RSS your posts into the network, where we will all be waiting to share the conversation with you (eg. widgety goodness, wg07, wguk07).

Wow, it’s been over a week since I posted. Loads going on with running the three initial courses (2 x mainstream, 1 x academics), developing our delicious new blogging course for business (social enterprises and others), invitations coming in from all over the place… and now, Widgety Goodness.

What is that you might ask? Well, if you have ever been on Facebook (ah, yes I guess the answer would be for most), you might have noticed all the applications you get sucked into using and sharing. Well, these are widgets. See previous post about what a widget is here.

Suffice to say, widgets are scorching right now. Particularly for marketing bods.

The Widgety Goodness 07 one-day event in Brighton 6 December is the first ever widget conference in the UK, and tickets are flying out the door. All going well, we’ll be doing it in New York next year.

I’m working as the backnetwork facilitator among other things, with the ever-happening Ivan Pope and co. I marked him as my “muse” in the relationships profile for backnetwork, which is largely why I took the gig. Ivan sometimes describes himself as an artist, entrepreneur, anarchist. How could I resist!

Putting together a conference such as Widgety Goodness is an exhausting process – mainly because we decided at the start that we were going to do it very quickly and in realtime. That is, we knew things were moving fast in the widgetsphere and we wanted to be able to reflect that as we put together the program. Time is now moving on and, although we haven’t quite nailed it all down, we can see the shape of the event and most of the speakers. We are selling tickets fast and we have a great bunch of sponsors who are involved in the conversation. The event social network is now up and running with it’s own moderator and all participants are being added to it. We have a great range of speakers, with local, european and US speakers coming to take part. The day will be topped off with a reception co-hosted with TechcrunchUK and opened up to the Brighton developer community. I’ll be focussing in more detail on all speakers over the next few weeks and introducing the final few participants. Whether you are in media or marketing or advertising or communications, or you are a developer or an entrepreneur with an interest or a need to know about widgets, gadgets and platforms, Widgety Goodness will be great value for money. Tickets are still available for this unique event.

We hope to have a few more surprises, but this is the gist of the event:

Chris Cunningham of Freewebs, widget dynamo and founder of WIMA (Widget Interactive Marketing Association) will keynote the morning session and lay out the commercial issues we are all looking at plus the steps Freewebs are taking in the US and the UK to promote widgets as a key marketing vehicle.
Following on, to introduce the agency side of the equation, we have Russell Davies from the OpenIntelligenceAgency. Russell, recently voted the third most influential person in the UK agency world (New Media Age), planner extraordinaire, blogger par excellence (eggsbaconchipsandbeans) and Campaign columnist among many other things, is the sort of person who will open our eyes and tell it as it is. He even has his own conference, interesting2007.
I’m really pleased to be able to follow up Russell with Colm O’Connor from Joost, bringing us his view of other widget platforms and how Joost is working with commercial partners to develop widgets on their platform.
From a really big agency we have Simon Andrews, Chief Strategy Officer, Mindshare Interaction, on the role of the agency in widget development and branded utility.
To round off the first morning session we have Steve Bowbrick, an Internet guru in his own right, co-founder of one of the original web agencies, Webmedia, ex-chair of Internet World conference, currently head of digital at KMI, and Jon Baines, one of the most creative digital agency guys in the UK, currently celebrating ten years of his agency, Lateral.

Following the morning coffee and networking break, we get even more widgety with Alex Bard from yourminis, kicking off a theme of widget distribution: where do they all end up, widgets in the wider world and then Emmanuel Prat of Widget Avenue, bringing us a European perspective on building a widget platform – what they want to offer and what the users want.
The morning is rounded off with another speaker that I’m really pleased
to have with us, Ankur Shah from Techlightenment, the Facebook
developers who brought us the legendary Bob Dylan Facebook app and a lot of other f8
wizardry. Techlightenment will be moving fast into the OpenSocial space
and Ankur will be bringing us his views on working with this and how it
relates to the Facebook platform.

After lunch we kick off with a big hello from Susan Mernit, Widgety Goddess and the inventor of the term Widgety Goodness. After Susan we have Rooly Eliezerov from Gigya, outriders of the widget distribution revolution, on where widgets can and can’t go and, most importantly, how we get them there. Will McInnes of Brighton social agency Nixon McInnes, will look at Being Social, what it is to be a social agency and how they are getting to be one. After that, Ori Soen from Musestorm will give us a key case study of a major media widget development project.
Following the afternoon coffee and networking break, we have Khris Loux from js-kit to kick off what I think may turn out to be a key subject: the Care and Control of widgets. Our final roster of speakers will all look at tracking, metrics, analysis, control and SEO in widgets. Khris will set the scene, followed by Anil Batra, SEO specialist and blogger, and finally Nilhan Jayasinghe, Head of Natural Search at Spannerworks.

The big story of this week, the launch of OpenSocial, will no doubt be a big theme at Widgety Goodness. I talked today with Ankur Shah of Techlightenment, who is lined up to speak on the Facebook platform. He will be expanding his talk to cover developing for OpenSocial. And Musestorm, who are speaking (CEO, Ori Soen) and sponsoring, have today announced an OpenSocial widget. This is going to be exciting.

More on the Musestorm announcement at the Snipperoo blog

Why hold a conference like this in Brighton? Well, apart from being the coolest spot on the planet and a great place to go for a day of mind expansion and networking, and quite apart from the shopping opportunities, it is quite simply a digital development city. Rosie Land sets out a lot more than five reasons why that is so.

Rosie Land: 5 reasons why digital Brighton rocks

Events

• Brighton Girl Geek Dinners
• Sussex Geek Dinner
• £5 app
• Brighton Ruby
• Flash Brighton
• SkillSwap Brighton
• Brighton Agile Forum
• Brighton Coding Dojo
• Farm Hack Day

Business

• Farm
• Vine
• Wired Sussex
• The Inuda Network

Conferences

• dConstruct
• BarCamp
• Develop
• Flash On The Beach
• Widgety Goodness

Coffee mornings

• Likemind Brighton
• OpenCoffeeSussex

On The Web

• BNM
• SussexDigital
• Brighton Bloggers

Friendster is opening up its platform for widgets. And yes, they call them widgets! You can check the developer documentation now.

Techcrunch

Friendster will allow developers to advertise with their widgets but will not require any revenue sharing; there will be a “widget directory” much like Facebook’s application directory; widgets in Friendster will be promoted virally using a “My Network Module” akin to Facebook’s news feed; Friendster widgets will be able to access “Friendster data” (which must mean profile, or “social graph”, data); and Friendster vows to improve the platform over time in response to community feedback.In what could amount to little more than fluff, but could also mean something more substantial, Friendster is claiming that its platform will be non-proprietary. The suggestion is that widgets developed for other platforms will be easily deployable on Friendster’s platform. Another possible differentiator: it looks as though widget creators will be allowed to display advertisements anywhere they please within their creations, and not just on canvas-like pages as in Facebook.

We’re really pleased to announce the participation of Ankur Shah, a founder of Techlightenment, in Widgety Goodness. Techlightenment is one of the leading Facebook application developers, responsible for the now legendary Bob Dylan application and Socialistics. Ankur has an interesting route to his current role and we expect a similarly interesting view of platforms, widgets and where it’s all leading.

A former Criminal Barrister, who has previously worked under endorsement from the UN and H. H. the Dalai Lama, Ankur Shah has utilised his knowledge of social interaction and brought it online. Under the brand name Techlightenment, they have created some of the most talked about Facebook applications on the web, from the Bob Dylan application to Socialistics.

Part of a bigger umbrella company: D.sruptive Ltd., their aim is to understand social interaction in a variety of spheres, ranging from education and the criminal justice system to marketing and the corporate world.

Susan Mernit (Yahoo, the Widgety Goddess) summed it up when she coined the phrase:

Welcome to the world of widgety goodness

It’s almost bibical.
Feeds(RSS) begat outliners(OPML)
Outliners begat tags
Tags began microformats
Microformats begat APIs
APIs begat widgets
Widgets begat start-ups
And the great mash up settled over the land.