How To Widget?

Being a publisher ain't so easy these days. I know a little bit about it now that I have this thing called a blog that I feel compelled to keep fresh and build (whatever that means, my audience has been flat for the past year - maybe because of the very subject of this post).

But things don't stand still. You need to do more everyday to keep up with all the changes afoot. And one of the biggest changes out there is the world of distributed media. Feeds, widgets, embed codes, apis, and other tools that allow the publisher to make their content available on other pages. You have to do this, it's critical and it's way more than just getting your content on my daughter's MySpace page. The web is disaggregating itself and reassembling itself in front of our very eyes as users take control of more pages on the web every day.

Now I've been a big fan of widgets, maybe even the poster child for them with the sidebars on this blog. Many people link to this blog when they talk about widget overload. I do love widgets but I have a view about widgets that I'd like to put out there.

Widgets should not be one more publishing system that we need to support. Widgets should be built on top of a feed based architecture. I am stuck on my four rules and I plan on sticking to them a little longer. They are:

1 - Microchunk it - Reduce the content to its simplest form.
2 - Free it - Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it.
3 - Syndicate it - Let anyone take it and run with it. 
4 - Monetize it - Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk.

Widgets are part of rules 3 and 4. Widgets are a syndication tool and a tracking tool. And hopefully they'll become a monetization tool as well.

But when I put on the hat of a publisher, I want a simple way to do all of this. And that takes me back to the feed. I like the idea of write once, publish anywhere and everywhere. When I hit the "save" button on this post, not only will this post hit the web at avc.blogs.com, but it will be put into my feed. That means it will appear in web-based feed readers and start pages all over the internet pretty much instantly. It should also mean that it (or at least the headline) should appear in widgets all over the web.

But many of the leading widget solutions don't support a feed-based architecture. I have a friend who is in charge of the web efforts of a large media company. He saw the news that Clearspring had just closed a big round of financing for "widget syndication" and asked me what I thought of them.

I told him that Clearsping was a great company but that he ought to think hard about his distributed media strategy before making any decisions. Does he want one solution for the web, another for feeds, a third for widgets, a fourth for video, and so on and so forth?

Or would he like to write once, publish everywhere?

If the answer is the latter then widget syndication systems must be built on top of a feed architecture, as should web video syndication systems, and any other systems that support a distributed media model.

Being a publisher is hard and getting harder so I'd like everyone building tools for publishers to think about making things simpler and to my mind, feeds are as simple as it gets.

Comments

[Derek Anderson]

Imagine what your subscription numbers would look like if all of your readers understood what a feed was and how to use it.

Based on personal experience, I have to assume that fully 3/4 of all Internet users have no idea what a feed is. For some reason, it escapes them.
I can hear them thinking..."Why would I want to hand select the information that I find important...and have it delivered to me as soon as it is published?"..."I would much rather visit multiple websites on a daily basis and take my chances."

...maybe it would benefit us all if we put a little definition box right next to our feed buttons...indicating the benefits to subscription.

...maybe I'm just talking to see myself talk.

[Derek Anderson]

...by the way...how do I get responses to this comment via feed?

I see this function on other blogs.

[Doug K.]

I believe that the power of widgets are underutilized. Very few do more then follow the old media thinking of controlling the channel and pushing data out for consumers. Widgets should be thought of as mini-applications that the user can interact with and I completely agree that they should be tied to feeds. If you want your widget to be successful then you need it to be as easy as possible for the end-user to use but you also need it to be as easy as possible for the site owner to use. By this I mean they don't have to do a lot to benefit a lot. They also need control so that if they want to do a lot then they can.

As for monetizing I do not think anyone is sure yet of the best way to monetize but I think MyBlogLog has some interesting ideas.

- Doug

[Doug K.]

I just understood what you were talking about when you said widgets fall under rules three and four. While I agree they do, they should also fall under rules 1 and 2. Users should be able to get the content in its simplest form and freely via the widget to use as they wish. They are a key component of widget interactivity that I posted about earlier.

When you talk about monetization in this respect do you mean for the widget company, the site owner or, I would guess, both?

I would also be interested in how you think that widgets may be monetized.

- Doug

[Rick]

By "feed architecture" do you mean RSS?

RSS has its limitations. XML feeds are richer and should be utlized for widgets and syndication.

[Dave Winer]

Fred, every few years I strip my blog down to its basics and then over time let it fatten up again. Maybe it's time to hit the reset switch.

I also think, at an intuitive level, that the gravity of TechMeme is not a good thing for diversity in teh tech blogosphere. I decided to cut myself out of the TM loop about a month ago, and it's been a good thing so far. I don't read it, and I don't allow TM to crawl my site. I've gotten my independence back.

The blogosphere, imho, was never meant to be a mail list, I believe it was meant to be the "anti-mail-list" where everyone stands alone, for better or worse.

I read your blog only because I subscribe to it, my choice, not someone else's. And not the result of group-think.

[Andy Swan]

I like the widget farm at AVC. I read the feed when I just want content, but I like the widgets because they show me what the blogger is into.

[alex]

Fred,

I believe in order for widgets to truly have longer term value they need to have access to dynamic content that pulls from standardized syndication platforms.

The widgets on www.yourminis.com are all mostly based on feeds for their content, whether its video, pictures, news, etc. most of that date comes from live feeds. If you embed our widgets for video, photos, bookmarks, file storage, news, etc - they all get their information live as soon as you syndicate it.

For example, if you upload a file to box.net (our storage partner) our widget automatically gets access to that file, if you use any of our video widgets, as soon as new content gets published to the video site our widget gets it, if someone embeds our news widgets as soon as the publisher hits save their your blog our widget gets the latest and greatest, etc...

I think it is very important to minimize the effort it takes a publisher to get their content syndicated and that is why we have designed our widgets based on this architecture.

[Omar Megdadi]

Check out Widgetbox.com...They have a widget called a Blidget (your blog as a widget). You can create one in minutes and add it to their vast widget gallery for anyone to come and grab.

[lawrence]

Widgetbox and Musestorm both offer platform / enterprise level RSS to Flash widget conversion. Clearspring may, but because they don't have an open platform available, I can't say for sure. Spring Widgets also does Flash to RSS conversion, though I'm not sure if they provide an enterprise level service. Grazr and FeedFlash are also playing in this space. Feedburner seems to be trying to move in as well. For a write up of the various services offered by some of these Widget management services, here's a post I wrote on the subject:

http://www.sexywidget.com/my_weblog/2007/02/making_sense_of.html

[iain]

* Interesting stats .... I'm finding that I've been prioritizing you and GigaOm down over the past few months.
* With GigaOm ... I like "his" articles and it appears that he has less time to do them :-( ... getting too "micro"
* With you ... I love the music posts, general biz posts ... but there can be overload on your own companies and family stuff. (not saying it needs to go away ... I like it ... but it has grown in the past few months)
* Cheers ... hope this "raw" view helps.

[michael addicott]

I Googled 'widget' and so I got here. At ups.com we had a widget called 'internet tools' that let people put tracking on their site. If you like, you can try a cognitive widget at brain.com (lets you check your mental speed) based on research at Stanford - you can add a widget to your site or blog.

[Hooman Radfar]

Fred, thanks for the kind words.

Just to clarify, most widgets are built using feeds. Even more widgets use general XML files. That being said, I am not clear on what you mean when you say widgets should support a "feed" architecture. They all tend to be xml-driven. How else would they get data? Can you explain what that means?

Our widgets for Time, USAToday, NBA and others are all XML-driven apps. In fact, the CTO of one of your investments(Feedburner) can validate that fact. He also can tell you that Clearspring widgets do support feeds because he has seen our platform.

With respect to your notion of having one system to manage all of your syndication efforts, we agree. In an ideal world, you would be able to syndicate all of your content via one platform. However that will take time. And, I do not necessarily agree that RSS feeds are the pin-point of this new ecosystem. As a data pipe for development, RSS is suboptimal. XML-RPC is much better for interactive read/write apps. For users, RSS is just not realistic. The truth of the matter is that for all the dork press around RSS, feeds are only being used by 2-3% of audiences. Why? Because it is too hard. My mom will never use it. But, she might click a button and pop a widget onto a personal page, or desktop. Widgets are graphical RSS.

Anyway, I definitely will try to post on this topic soon, but just wanted to give you a shout. Thanks!

[AlFromChicago]

Fred --
Speaking as a Publisher -- I agree with you wholeheartedly and also have a follow up question. We use Spring widgets to automatically create widgets for any topic in BuzzTracker -- go to http://www.buzztracker.com/category/ny_mets for example and you can see what I mean.

But here's a question I have yet to get answered -- maybe one of your readers can help -- how does Google, Yahoo, MSN treat widgets on other sites? We all know that *links* help with SEO -- but do widgets? Do they get ignored? How do these add to mix?

And in a distributed world where people are actively promoting widgets (and I believe that widgets and ad networks will start to merge in interesting ways) - where everyone has tons of these out there -- What does Google do? How does that impact our search results, etc.?

[Grand Egress]

This discussion is stimulating but feels like maybe we are getting to the point of making a distinction without a difference?

To wit, the basic model was shattered by the Internet itself. Everything since is a refinement -- awesome cool valuable stuff, but not new paradigms.

The old model fell into place say, 500 years ago, with Gutenburg's moveable type and press -- technology and automation that made the widespread dissemination of information achievable -- unlike the previous ages, suddenly everyone could be a consumer -- but was so expensive that being a producer and distributor was the domain only of the elite, rich, or corporate.

With the advent of the Internet, now we can use networked devices to produce and distribute information incredibly cheaply and easilty -- now everyone is a producer, distributor and consumer.

(YES!!!)

But even the most basic and early networked devices had/have controls -- some hardware, some software, some native, some not -- that allow us to "surf" or "browse" information and resources and people as we like.

When I used Mosaic 1.0 to bookmark Pathfinder.com, I was doing exactly the same thing as someone today using an RSS reader to grab the syndication of AVC.blogs.com -- using a tool to navigate an ocean of stuff and isolate stuff that appeals to me.

So, whether I prefer to click a bookmark list to go to a website or to see a blinking icon or "widget" telling me a feed is waiting seems an infinitely interesting topic for a consumer focus group to research... but not a revolution?

(Also, what really is the difference between wudgets and RSS and the "pushed" media revolution of web 1.0?)