Webmasters will soon be able to auction off widget space on their sites and blogs managed and marketed by advertising powerhouse Google. Advertisers will produce a Google Gadget in standard IAB unit sizes for distribution across the Google network at CPC or CPM billing rates. Google will bolster its current Google Analytics package to support better tracking paid and free widget campaigns in this sub-page and asynchronous pageload environment. The Google Gadget advertising beta program was publicly announced during a marketing summit for the automotive industry according to Online Media Daily. By the end of 2007 Google will offer its…
Category Archives: Software
Podcast: Social media trends with Charlene Li
Social computing has changed the way we interact with the Web. Our information consumption and production benefits from the participation of the crowd in its various forms, creating niche audiences and new types of curators independent of space and time. We’re connected to local experts on hiking, cooking, parenting, programming, and much more. Yet social media extends beyond the realm of content creators, bolstered by the comments, ratings, rankings, sharing, and reading masses that help us find the content we seek. Forrester Research released a report last week, Social Technographics, detailing levels of social media participation among 10,000 adults and…
Nokia Widgets for Series 60
Widgets are coming to Series 60 handsets this Fall, bringing tiny pieces of content onto the application menu of the world’s best-selling smartphone OS. The S60 Web Run-Time builds upon the existing open source technologies in the S60 browser and provides a development experience very close to Apple’s Dashboard widget environment. The widget software will be available in version 3.2 of Nokia’s operating system due out this Fall. The Series 60 operating system is currently installed on over 85 million mobile devices produced by Lenovo, LG, Nokia, and Samsung. S60 widgets are marked up using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript…
Google Feed API
Google Reader finally has its first official API. Any developer in the world can request the entire history of a web feed from Google’s geo-distributed server cloud in a normalized response for inclusion in their websites or products. I’ve been hoping for such an API since I first deconstructed the Google Reader backend in December 2005. Most users will likely interact with the Google AJAX Feed API through a JavaScript library included on their site or a pre-configured badge generated on the Google site. The Feed API wrapper is part of a larger effort by Google to extend its search…
Two feed syndication talks at Web 2.0 Expo
The Web 2.0 Expo officially kicked off yesterday at the Moscone conference center in San Francisco, bringing together thousands of web technologists to learn new things and market new web products. I participated in conference planning as a program chair, selecting a range of topics to educate technical product managers on the latest web technology, specifically in the Web 2.0 Fundamentals track. I’m leading two sessions at the conference on feed syndication technologies and I’ll be in attendance all three days if you’d like to say hello. Intermediate to Advanced Syndication Web frameworks and software packages now feature basic…
Google Gadget ecosystem statistics for March
The Google gadget ecosystem received 960 million pagevieiws last week, a 36% jump from numbers reported by the search giant just one month ago. Users are adding themes, videos, games, and even a few productivity tools to their personalized homepages and blog sidebars, creating new content for fun and business. In this post I’ll provide some new statistics about Google gadget growth over the past month, building upon my larger statistical overview of Google Gadgets in early March. March saw the rebirth of two widget brands, and spring cleaning on a few others. On March 8 Yahoo! launched a major…
MySpace CSO on keeping users safe
This month’s CSO Magazine features an interview with MySpace security czar Hemanshu Nigam. The article discusses the wealth of available information about the site’s 150 million members for both good and bad purposes, and ways MySpace is working to clean up and protect its community and brand. Parent company News Corp. wants to create a safe community attractive to new users and advertisers, yet MySpace members are so active and so varied it’s not always an easy task. Nigam formerly worked for heavy-handed intellectual property enforcers Microsoft and the MPAA. Interesting excerpts No senior citizens MySpace members can no longer…
State of the Google Gadget ecosystem: gadget features
Gadget platforms have many levels of integration and customization beyond a metadata wrapper and some markup. Beginners and tinkerers might stick to the basics, but some gadget authors go beyond the plain essentials and add support for multiple languages, tabbed views, and specify any requirements a gadget may expect. In yesterday’s post I provided an overview of the Google Gadgets ecosystem, detailing the types of content and authors producing Google universal gadgets. Today I’ll dive into developer features and observed implementations. Language support Content types Gadget height Top built-in libraries Gadgets produced by Google Extra requirements Summary Language support Google…
State of the Google Gadget ecosystem
Last week the Google Gadgets team released page view numbers for gadgets in its directory, giving outsiders their glimpse of gadget activity across Google Personalized Homepage, Google Desktop, and syndicated throughout the web through Google Gadgets For Your Page. Over the weekend I crawled the entire Google Gadget directory, collecting information about every listed gadget to create a better and more complete understanding of a widget/gadget ecosystem including its level of health, geographic diversity of authors and supported users, popular categories, and some of the most popular gadget programming methods (just to name a few). In this post I’ll share…
Six Apart widget podcast with Byrne Reese
Last Friday I visited Six Apart’s headquarters in San Francisco to talk about widgets with Byrne Reese. Byrne is the former product manager of TypePad, currently a product manager of Movable Type, and a developer of plugins and widgets used in both products. Byrne and I talked about the current state of widgets in Six Apart’s four blogging products: TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, and Vox. Our 25-minute conversation about Six Apart widgets is available as a 11 MB audio download. I will summarize a few highlights from our conversation below. Listen to Niall Kennedy interview Byrne Reese of Six Apart…