Gnomie Intrepid writes:

Chris,

I did a search on your blog and noticed you haven’t blogged about this yet. I’ve been using a widget-creating Web app from Widgetbox.com to link to my blog on blogspot.com (to see my “blidget” in action, visit my MySpace page [the profile is NOT set to private], and to view the blog, go here). The site calls widgets for blogs “blidgets,” which is the app I will be describing here. There are other type of widgets you can create there, but I’m only using the “blidget.”

The “blidget,” in summary, allows you to post a widget on a site that lists the recently blogged posts on your blog in a wonderfully looking, easy to read widget. The widget has clickable links back to your blog, so this helps network your blog out to more readers. If they like your blog enough, they can click the “Get Widget” icon at the bottom of the “blidget,” and they can throw it up on other sites, or even their own, and they all link back to your blog.

The shining glory of this Web app is its convenience. The widget automatically knows when you post to your blog and updates the widget automatically, which makes the upkeep of the widget very minimal. If your blog is supported, and most major blogging sites like Blogspot, LiveJournal, and WordPress are, then you just fill your blog link in and start creating (I believe the code is RSS-based). Also, there are several great looking soft gradient colors to choose from, and options varying from showing titles only, or titles with a preview of the blog post. You can also throw a custom icon into the corner of the “blidget” instead of the few selections they have for you via direct URL link to the image. I haven’t made a symbol for my blog yet, so I’m using the default Blogspot “B” icon.

They also allow you to select from a variety of code types, including but not limited to making the “blidget” flash, and a special MySpace code to get around the problem with links in Flash on MySpace. When you click “Get Widget,” a window appears with the several different Web site-specific code types, and the HTML code. It is automatically copied to your clipboard so that it is only a matter of pasting the code where you would like the widget.

There are two incredibly useful tools you can use after you create your “blidget.” After you create a widget, click on the “My Widgetbox” tab from the homepage and then select your widget. Scroll down a little, and this is where you see the first bit of information in an easily readable format. They have a graph that shows how many hits your widget has and on what days the hits occurred. This helps to see how many people have been reading your blog and actually using your widget! The other nice tool they have is the pie chart that shows where people have been clicking on your “blidget.” This shows on what domains your “blidget” has been recieving the most traffic! This helps you see where most of your traffic is being directed from. To get to the pie chart, click on the “View more details” button to the bottom right of the graph.

As far as I know, there’s no limit to how many times you can hotlink the widget or a bandwidth limit, so you can toss it up on several sites without worry. Best of all, its free!

Enjoy your blidget!

Microsoft made a mistake with its investment in Facebook. Just because Google has made a business out of Internet advertising doesn’t mean that a traditional software company is going to do well here, too.

Facebook is likely to be seen as Microsoft’s ace in the Web 2.0 Wars. Google gave birth to the “online OS” by providing many of the applications you might expect to find in installable form. Today, others, such as Facebook, are growing exponentially because they offer much more than just “another social medium.” Yet as great as the little widget-like applications that everyone is going nuts over at Facebook are, at its core, Facebook can and will become yesterday’s news someday. Here’s why:

• Pull the plug. Seriously, just pull the plug on the connectivity to that platform and watch all of that Web 2.0 nonsense deflate right before your eyes. Whether it be a localized issue with being able to connect to any specific portal/service/ or worse, an international hiccup in the world’s ability to connect to the Web 2.0 company. It could happen…

• Besides eyeballs, what is the real value that Facebook is providing? Exactly, it’s a roundabout way to reach ad dollars. At the end of the day, Facebook joining Microsoft’s own portfolio will be great for Facebook but it’ll do very little for a company like Microsoft. Why? Microsoft is the new IBM as Facebook is the new Yahoo! (1990s era). Microsoft knows enterprise, but it has seriously lost its traction with most home users in almost every sense of the word. This is just a fact; people have been burned badly with high MS Office prices and Vista incompatibilities. Microsoft needs to focus on one business at a time as far as I’m concerned.
• Microsoft needs to understand that the way it develops software is dying. This doesn’t mean Microsoft will cease to exist in the near future, but the closed source mindset with mobile OS is taking its last breath. Same goes with Facebook. As a trend, sure, it’s cool. Yet to dump millions into it is just plain reaching for the stars and proof of a stale Redmond development scene.

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A lot of people think that only Mac owners can use those beautiful and popular little software utilities called widgets. Not so, my friends, not so.

Long before Apple released OS X Tiger operating system and its impressive widget suite called Dashboard, a Web site named Konfabulator was cranking beautiful widgets for both platforms. You can download a trial copy here and see for yourself and they even dropped the price from $29 to $19.99.

The best part, is that every day developers rush to add new widgets to the Konfabulator website. My new favorite is one aptly named Memory Hog.

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