Since we at SpringWidgets are really big fans of Google and everything they do. I thought this would be a great time to officially say how much we love the iGoogle page by letting everyone know that we have recently added in support for automatic posting of all SpringWidgets into your personalized iGoogle page!
Just choose the widget you are interested in, configure it however you like it to look and function and then select the Google icon in the share it box.
The whole process takes only a few seconds and is one of the easiest ways to put one of our widgets on a page that we have available. Way to go Google!
With all the recent focus on widgets, it's not surprising that everyone is building a widget destination of some sort. We at SpringWidgets will continue to build support for each new destination as APIs become available and look forward to helping enable 2007 truly being the year of the widget.
Here is my iGoogle page. Complete with today's MLB games and a countdown to the next episode of NBC's Heroes!
SpringWidgets welcomes it's first third-party developer uploaded SpringWidget.
Only days after our silent launch of widget uploading, Tony MacDonnell and the rest of the team from Teknision have uploaded a Finetune widget, the first on our platform not built internally.
I have to say that I'm really impressed! The combination of a comprehensive music library, the ability to set a 45 song playlist and being viral is a killer idea. I was able to find all the songs that I wanted to add to create a playlist that truly reflected my musical tastes.
The interface for the widget is fantastic and fun. When you have a song selected, the album art is displayed in a style that looks like a row of CDs sitting in a shelf. It reminds me of the very cool "coverflow" effect that Apple recently put into iTunes.
Of course, with the age of songs that I like, a stack of records metaphor might have been more appropriate ;-)
Here is my live SpringWidget, go ahead and play around:
I've added this widget on my personal blog and my MySpace profile to give it a whirl and I'm very happy with the results. While the size of the widget is not configurable, it's designed at a size that fits nicely into the music section on Myspace and almost any blog sidebar.
What does Tony have to say about developing on the SpringWidgets platform? - I pulled the following quote from his blog:
"We've used WidgetBox, Yahoo Widgets, Google Gadgets, OSX Dashboard, and so far the Springbox was the most fun, and rendered the coolest final product at the end of the day."
Of course, the real cool thing for FineTune is that they were able to make it down to the desktop months before Adobe Apollo is to become available and they made it there with SpringWidgets. This begs the question: "were there already footprints on the moon when Neil Armstrong landed?"
We are very glad to have FineTune, Tony and his Teknision team on board with SpringWidgets, and we love the product they have built. Go ahead and give it a try and see if you like it as much as we do!
RSS is now one of the most valuable metrics on the net. Increasing your RSS subscriber count is a measurable way to show the popularity of your site. As RSS is an opt in way for readers to view your site contents, they can easily stop being a subscriber at any time.
It shows how far RSS has come when John Chow and Shoemoney start a competition to see who can get the most new subscribers in a month. Notice how it wasn't a competition to get the most traffic or the most subscribers to an email list but who can get the most RSS subscribers.
Why RSS subscribers
John and Shoe are both canny marketers and know the value of RSS. RSS is a transparent metric that shows a loyal readership. If a site starts to slide in it's content then readers will no longer subscribe. They would rather gain an RSS subscriber than an extra visitor.
Whilst the challenge is a bit of fun there is also a serious reason John and Shoe have gotten together to run this little competition. At the end of the competition they will both have a larger loyal subscriber base. This competition has gained them a large number of new subscribers which generally means more revenue for them.
This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.
Have you ever wondered how much each subscriber to your RSS feed is worth. Well according to Mark over at 45n5 that magic number is currently $30. Mark arrived at this figure by dividing the price blogs have recently sold for by the number of subscribers to the blog.
I have previously made predictions about RSS playing a more important role back in October 2006. It looks like RSS is now an important metric to measure the success of a site and it is also starting to play a larger role in deciding the monetary value of a blog.
RSS subscribers and their value
Although Mark's use of RSS as a measurement of value was just a bit of fun it does show that RSS is a valued metric. A year ago most webmasters and readers would not have placed much if any value in the number of subscribers you have.
As RSS becomes a more valued metric the value of the RSS feed itself will grow. There are going to be more advertisers willing to buy advertising in an RSS feed and the value of RSS will grow. This is because many RSS subscribers do not click through to the website itself but use the feed to consume the content.
This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.
You've all seen the little FeedBurner subscriber counters on sites that display a site or more often a blogs number of RSS subscribers. Whilst this is a nice widget to display on your site there isn't much in the way of customizing to display something different.
Plaint text subscriber count
There is a way to display the number of readers you have for your feed by using FeedBurners API. This means you can display your subscriber count within some text, for example as part of a blog post. You could also have a separate message somewhere on you site saying X number of readers subscribe to this site.
You can use the PHP code below. You need to have PHP5 otherwise the SimpleXMLElement command will not work.
//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser. curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); //Set the URL curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl); //Execute the fetch $data = curl_exec($ch); //Close the connection curl_close($ch);
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data); $fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];
//end get cool feedburner count ?>
The next line of PHP needs to be located where you want the subscriber count number to appear. This code needs to occur after the code above for it to work.
This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.
Just choose the widget you are interested in, configure it however you like it to look and function and then select the Google icon in the share it box. 
