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Aaron Worsham

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Instant Widget, simply add RSS [Recipe]

Lets talk content for a second.  If you took a moment to consider the websites that you find useful in your business sector most of them are going to be text based.  In the financial industry for example, your Bloombergs, Reuters, Barons and Wall Street Journals are all brokering in letters and numbers.  Words are their currency, more than dollars, Yens, or Pounds.  Likely your corporate site, too, is trading on its reputation to educate your customers through words.  All this textual content is going stale if unused.

One idea for your websites leftover content is to make a quick content widget.  They’re delicious, non-fattening and fun at parties.

Prep time is 15 minutes.

Here are the ingredients you’ll need.

  1. Text based content
  2. An RSS feed on that content
  3. A widget automator

I take the first ingredient for granted and assume your corporate website is not just a blank page surrounding a small ‘Coming Soon’ picture.  Now with your content in hand, gently break it up into smaller pieces.  These pieces are going to be used in our RSS feed.  RSS feeds are great little additions to any website.  They help make content on your site easily available to other computers by encoding it in XML.  If you don’t know if your site has an RSS feed, go ahead and ask your web programmer.  Okay, now that we have our content broken up we can put it into our RSS feed.  The feed isn’t going to do much right now, so just let it rest on your website.  We’ll come back to it.  Now, lets create our widget using your choice of widget automator sites.  For this recipe, I will be using SpringWidgets, but you could use WidgetBox or ClearSpring.

To use SpringWidget you will need to register a free account.  Lets do that now at the top right of the screen.  Once that is done, go ahead and click on the Express Widgets button on the left of the main page.  Now its time to add your RSS feed to the mix.  Take your RSS feed and slowly enter it into the field.  Try not to spill. SpringWidget will now use your RSS feed to pull in your content, wrapping it with a decorative box pattern.  That’s it, you have a widget for your content.  Almost good enough to eat.

The serving options are endless.  You can play around with your widget, style it how you want.  Once you are ready, the bottons on the left will help you embed this widget into Social Networks like Facebook, blogging tools like Blogger and WordPress, or anyone’s web page using the Javascript code.

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Widgets added to Buzzword Bingo

My boss just asked me to look into this Techcrunch interview with Eric Feng, CTO of Hulu announcing embeddable widgets for their online media site.  Must be a slow news day over at TC.  Am I alone in my surprise that Hulu didn’t launch with embeddable widgets?

Here’s the thing, widgets are a fundamental part of modern web communities, information distribution, viral marketing, you name it.   Just about anything we are trying to discuss here at Sazbean can involve a widget of some form.  They are incredibly important components for building better online businesses. And yet, the term ‘widget’ is getting all fuzzy and nondescript.

The word ‘widget’ has a nasty habit of sticking in the minds of almost anyone who casually reads tech articles hoping to glom onto buzz words they can throw at their IT department in the morning.  It sounds just technical enough to be important while retaining the rounded corner friendliness that glosses over all the scary details.   Widgets have become MacGuffins you check off on a list, like shifting paradigms and finding synergies.  In truth, widgets are invaluable.  But to use them correctly, you have to first decide if you are a provider or a consumer.

Widgets themselves are simply small kernels of code.  In the web today they exist to extend some content or function out from a single website to hundreds, thousands or millions of separate sites who want that content or function associated with their page.  Likely the example with the most exposure is the Google AdSense widget, which is a small kernel of code that Google wrote and millions have placed on their website’s pages.  When talking about widgets there are are always two parts to play, like a dance.   One part takes the lead by making the widget which connects to either their site or a publicly available, usually popular site (e.g. Flickr or YouTube).  The other part follows by embedding that widget in their site’s HTML source code.

From my experience, anyone thinking of adding widgets to their site need first decide on the goal.  Do you want to provide your content or service out to the world or are you looking to add content or services onto your business site?  Are you looking to drive traffic to your site, or are you hoping to keep them there longer?  Is there a service or function for which your online customers are pleading or is there something your site does that is better than the competition that you would like to brand?

The first half of the next series will deal with getting widgets for your site.  Useful business widgets that can instantly improve your sites value.  Then, we will look at a few services that can take your content and make it into its own widget, something your customers can load on their site and help spread the word.

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Ustream is streaming our language

I’ll be honest, its Friday.  Its gorgeous outside. I’m doing research on this post by watching shows on ustream.tv.

In truth it is hard to pull myself away from the high quality live broadcasts that sit up at the top of the ustream select channels.  Shows like Buzz Out Loud (a CNET property) are slickly produced and highly engaging examples of what businesses can do with ustream’s distribution technology. While CNET may have more polish in their delivery, their setup really isn’t much beyond a set on a show floor, two suits in front of a a good mic and a stationary camera.  Replace that show floor with a conference booth, or a marketing board room, store opening or factory floor and now you’re a broadcaster for your business.

ustream.tv has an interesting backstory.  Co-founders John Ham and Brad Hunstable met as cadets at the Army’s West Point Academy.  While serving as officers during wartime they experienced the troubles soldiers had in contacting many family members and friends within the short time given.  They started ustream as a way to connect many people to one soldier broadcasting over the internet.  From millitary to civilian, ustreams interactive technology fit comfortably into the Live Streaming space being left open by more established video hosting players.  In a Fox News interview the founders seem comfortable in their monitization plans which involve traditional silos as Ad revenue, partnerships and sponserships.  Funding for the live internet broadcaster has involved Angel funding from Ross Perot and the young company claim to list General Wesley Clark as a board member.

Getting away from the corporate About Us page for a moment, ustream does have a good man-on-the-street reputation.  Their video community is well policed for copyright and inapporporate content, lending to their legit rep.  Streaming tools available are intuitive to use, which is a must have for the competitve market.  Offering Javascript embedding, pre-recorded video, and chat capability is also standard selection.  Their monitization model is standard enough to say that most small broadcasters will be able to use their service for free.  Really for me the distinctive asset is a customer base which includes CNET, Penny Arcade and Digg.

Someday Sazbean will ready yet for live broadcasting.  When that day comes ustream will have our business.  Unless, you know… there is someone better by then.  Im looking at you justin.tv