If you didn't have a chance to read Adam Ostrow's article, "The Governator Takes to Twitter and Widgets to Pass California Budget" up on Mashable a few days ago, take a look; it's an interesting read.   

In a particularly interesting intersection between governmental policy decisions and the use of new technology (widgets in particular), Ostrow points to the "Legislature's Failure to Act" widget available on the California Governor's home page, which features a moving clock of how many days the state has gone without having a budget passed.

In my estimation, government + budget policy + widgets = interesting

You can check out the full article here.

I'd like to take this opportunity to wish you a Happy 2009 from all of us here at NewsGator!  There is no better time than the start of a new year to remind you to check out our current products as well as to whet your appetite for future innovations you'll see us release this year.

Check out our powerful, free Editor's Desk widget platform, which allows you to build, manage, and track widgets.  Or, if you're an existing customer of ours, check out our exciting related content offerings that can be added to your account.  Also, consider our branded iPhone applications, which allow your company to deliver a branded media experience to iPhone users via a custom, native App based on the award-winning NetNewsWire.

Though the details will have to remain under wraps at the moment, I can promise you that in 2009 you will see a number of exciting new product (and partnership) launches that will continue to reaffirm NewsGator's relevance in, and contribution to, innovation in the media and consumer products space.   I look forward to sharing these developments with you in 2009.  Thanks, in advance, for coming along with me.

Once again, Happy New Year from all of us here at NewsGator. 

There's a short article up on BMighty.com, which bills itself as a site for "practical technology expertise for growing companies," that provides a couple good examples of companies (somewhat outside the traditional online media space) using widgets to successfully market their products. 

There's a quote from Liza Hausman, VP of Marketing over at Gigya, who says that the key to a successful widget is to spread the word about it and encourage downloads; in her words, "Create something that's relevant and makes consumers want to interact with you."  Well said.

You can read the article in its entirety here.

As always, our technical support engineers -- Jenny & Dan -- have a helpful post up on the NewsGator Technical Blog about the recent Facebook Application changes and how they may affect your NewsGator widgets. 

As they point out, "in the past couple months Facebook has changed their application architecture a number of times, and we have steadily attempted to keep up with them (for the most part, successfully)."  But, the most recent changes were drastic enough to actually affect some of our widgets.   

So, in this post, they've laid out all sorts of tips for you to avoid any potential issues courtesy a brand spakin' new Facebook Wizard that was loaded into our Editor's Desk platform yesterday.  This should guide you through any wrinkles that may come up as a result of Facebook changing their application architecture!  You can read the whole post here. 

As always, happy widgeting!

I've talked a lot about our new Related Content Service on this blog, but have you actually had a chance to experience it live, in the flesh?  If not, you should play around with it on this site.  Why?  Because it's really cool, and I think you'll agree with me in a moment.  The related content feature works best on individual posts as opposed to the front/home page of a site since the engine scans the text on a page, and, in this case, there are a lot of different topics I cover here so it would be hard to distill one or two topics.

The real utility of the offering is on a individual post basis.  For example, my post yesterday was titled, "Quick Link: The Widget is Not a Strategy?"   If you look at the related content widget on the right sidebar of the post, you'll see  5 posts from other sources that are contextually related to the content in my post; in addition, the related content engine has intelligently discovered the best overall topic label for my post is "marketing," which you'll see in orange letters at the bottom of the widget.

Let me give you another example to drive home how cool this feature is.  I wrote a post earlier in the week called, "A Widget onto the Future?" which discussed the potential for using widgets for educational purposes. If you look at the related content widget, (once again, on the right sidebar) you'll see that our related content service has intelligently picked 5 posts that are contextually relevant to my post and has also, automatically, deemed that my post covers the topics "education" & "teaching."

Pretty neat, eh?  If you're interested in learning more about this feature, which can be "turned on" for your Editor's Desk account, please contact me at joshl@newsgator.com.

Joe Marchese has an article over at MediaPost, where he explains that the widget is not an effective marketing or advertising strategy, at least not by itself.  While you might initially question why I'm linking to a post thats seems to splash cold water on widgets, his thinking almost exactly squares with our own mantra at NewsGator Media & Consumer Products.  His comments, which I agree with, don't discount widgets offhand, rather they affirm the need to step back and take a look at your current marketing strategy before you (blindly) launch a widget campaign.  He says,

"The widget is not your strategy. Making the widget itself central to your strategy would be like saying that video is the center of your strategy, which begs the question; "Great, now what?" So we are going to make widgets; what widgets are we going to make? How are we going to distribute them? Why would people take them? Why would people share them? What do we hope to gain by getting people to use them? How are we going to measure success? These are the questions that will keep agencies gainfully employed for the decades to come -- at least, those that figure it out."

These points very much reaffirm one of the best practices that we tell our clients: don't develop a "widget strategy"; instead, determine if widgets hep you to achieve your the objectives and goals in your existing marketing plan.  If they do, then figure out how to implement widgets into this plan to further these goals.  In short, Joe is absolutely right that you should definitely think about some of the questions he mentions above before embarking on a widget campaign.

In an exciting development, TIME has named NewsGator's NetNewsWire one of the top 10 iPhone applications of the year!  I would like to congratulate Brent Simmons – the creator of NetNewsWire.  (If you're not familiar with NetNewsWire, it is a free native iPhone application based on the market-leading, critically-acclaimed RSS feed reader for Mac.) Here's what TIME had to say:

"There's no better way to keep up with your daily perambulations on the Net than via an RSS reader, which basically pushes content from any website or blog to your computer in a format that resembles email. NetNewsWire is one of the best free programs for computers, allowing you to easily subscribe to any feed and synchronizing what you've read across any computers you use. This app adds your iPhone to the party, allowing you to read perfectly formatted text on demand, as well as offline."

This is high praise for a product all of us at NewsGator are proud of us, especially given that it syncs with NewsGator’s suite of RSS readers, including NetNewsWire for Macintosh, FeedDemon, Inbox, and NewsGator Online - providing users a lightweight, easy application to keep up with feeds on the go.

If you have an iPhone and consume RSS feeds, you should download a free version today!

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that at any one given time, there are a lot of different things going on at NewsGator, since we have a whole host of products that provide solutions for a wide range of issues and end users.  You'll also know that I sometimes like to profile exciting developments that are going on outside of NewsGator's Media & Consumer Products.

Well, here's one of them: today we're launching NewsGator Social Sites 2.5.  If you don't know about Social Sites, it's an enterprise product that enhances Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007's enterprise capabilities.  Today's product launch includes cool new updates that include enhanced analytics, search resources, activity streaming features and more.  Basically, we like to see NewsGator's Social Sites as "Facebook for the Enterprise."

In short, companies use Social Sites to drive improved internal communication, simplify the discovery of knowledge and experts and to enhance company-wide collaboration, and improve overall productivity, providing tangible benefits to enterprise companies.  For instance, NewsGator Social Sites 2.5 allows users to create a community discussion around any article, document, or blog post created in Share Point, which can be rated on a five-point scale within Social Sites to enhance discovery by other users.

I know that our enterprise software team listened to a lot of customer feedback in creating NewsGator Social Sites 2.5, and I'm sure that the additions this time around make it an even better enhancement to SharePoint.

Reminder: tomorrow (Tuesday, Dec 16) we have a free webinar, "Drive Online Ad Revenue with Related Content," taking place at 2pm EST, hosted by Walker Fenton -- GM of NewsGator's Media & Consumer Products .

You've heard a fair bit about our new related content offering on this blog because I'm really excited about this product offering which can provide numerous benefits to your media company or organization as well as the readers/viewers of your products. 

This half-hour webinar will cover the following topics:

• How the Related Content feature works
• The Related Content options – related articles & topic pages
• Why adding this feature to your site allows you to tap into the industry’s largest database of RSS content
• How this service will increase ad inventory for new revenue streams and help you achieve significant ROI
• The other benefits of this feature, including: enhanced SEO, increased web traffic & page views, enriched content, a flexible pricing model, and diminished dependence on traditional news sources

We hope you'll join us for what's sure to be an informative and compelling discussion of our new related content services.  This is your last chance to register for the webinar here.

Andy Guess over at Inside Higher Ed has written an intriguing article about the future of widgets and their potential applications in the field of education.  His finding is that widgets are "real enough within the digital ether that some educators want to turn them into teaching tools." 

It's interesting to think about his contention that widgets may turn out to be ideal "for creating interactive, individualized instructional materials that can live on a course Web site, a personal blog or even a mobile phone" -- in other words, highly portable teaching or instruction platforms.  Sounds logical to me.  He adds another important point that might presage (or, really, lay the ground work for) widgets having a bright future in education space: "as the latest versions of course management packages adopt module-based interfaces and as colleges’ Web portals cull together widget-like boxes for the latest news and e-mail, the objects are becoming more familiar to students — even if they don’t realize it yet." 

So if many students are already using widget-like applications for school, it seems that "true" widgets that can be ported to multiple places and platforms would be the natural next step up from the widget-like interface of a lot of new course management tools that he mentions.  I'd say the future looks bright for widgets (in the education arena).

Good food for thought...

You should read the entire post here; it's a good read.