FREE Blogging Platform with Widgets

Terapad is a great blogging platform. And not just a blogging platform - it offers a bunch more value, such as shops, forums, web pages - everything you could want. It also allows you to add all sorts of things in and to totally redesign your whole site if you wish. And you can add Snipperoo easily to your site.  Here's our test site.
The best news today - it's now completely FREE. Well, it does carry advertising, but it's the most powerful free platform I've come across. 

Real World Widgets

A journalist asked me today what the best widgets I'd seen was. I didn't really have an answer at the time. Then I came across Kiva. Kiva is a micro-lending scheme. You lend money to specific loan requests across the world - from as little as $25. You choose who you lend to. This is micro lending at its best I guess. It's hard to choose, but hugely rewarding to help lives like this. And what's more - you get the money back at the end of the loan term.
So I signed Snipperoo up and made our first loan. I've made a company policy that we will set aside $1000 of our reserves to loan through Kiva. We will keep this as a rolling loan - as it gets repaid we will lend it out again. Assuming things here go according to plan, we will up this amount annually.
Best of all, Kiva have widgets that allow you to boast about what you've done and spread the word. 
Now, I suggest you go and create a company policy to loan through Kiva. Or just invest your spare cash here - what a brilliant scheme. Let's see if we can get Yawovi fully funded! Click the widget!
(Thanks to Richard Read/Write for the link)

Social Networking Awards - The Top Social Networks of 2006 - Mashable!

Just noticed Mashable's Social Networking Awards 2006 results are out. Here is the Widgets and Add-Ons category:

Our Choice: Slide.com

People’s Choice: Zwinky

Hot for 2007: RockYou, Stickam, Snocap, Zingfu, MyBlogLog

View Nominees

Slide.com and RockYou have been the most talked-about widgets this year, with Slide.com gaining a little more traction with the MySpace set. Both are impressive products which give users the freedom to express themselves. Even the launch of MySpace’s own service, MySpace slideshows, didn’t put a dent in the popularity of these two slideshow tools. Zingfu, another one of our favorites this year, has also achieved success by allowing users to create funny images of themselves and their friends. Meanwhile, we think Stickam’s live webcams are a killer idea, and the service will be a big success. We’re also hopeful that MyBlogLog, a service that helps communities to form around blogs, will successfully expand to the mainstream in 2007 - they added support for MySpace only a few weeks ago, and we think that could be crucial.

The popular vote, meanwhile, went to Zwinky. The avatar service has a huge, dedicated user base consisting largely of teens. In our original review, we said that Zwinky “will probably be a massive viral success despite a lack of interest from the geek elite”. We stand by that claim going into 2007.

Lost?

I got this from VCMike's blog. He got it from iA in Tokyo . If you're feeling lost, maybe this will help?

Do you speak widget?

A Language of Widgets

Do we need more language around widgets? It seems to me that trying to discuss the finer points of widget functionality quickly leads to some inventiveness with language. It's clear that you need to name things in order to bring them into being. Here are my suggestions for the parts of and functions of widgets. This is my view of what widgets are about and of the sort of things that the widget industry will be discussing over the next few years.

If you want to discuss the relationship between your Manifest and your Value, how Embedders desire Reward, or how a Virate can increase your Host numbers, then you need to learn the language of Widgets.

Home: where a widget originates from

Embedder: the person who embeds the widget in their site

• e.g. 'We need to get the word out to all potential embedders'

Host: a site within which the widget is embedded

• e.g. 'Our campaign envisages 10,000 radical alternative Hosts for this widget by month end'.

Manifest: a visible manifestation of the widget

• How the widget displays in the page when embedded, e.g. 'The original Manifest was a bit big, but luckily it was possible to adjust it' or 'Let's keep the Manifest really small so it fits in the sidebar'.

Value: a function of the widget that benefits the embedder

• Why anyone would want to put a widget in their site. This can be anything that the target Embedders find attractive: money, status, power, credibility, e.g. 'Our widget gives you Zlygo points for each clickthrough' or 'Only the top ranked football sites can have this widget'.

Reward: a function of the widget that rewards the viewer

• Why anyone would want to engage with a widget, e.g. 'Win a ticket to the finals', 'Instant news headlines', 'Get your own copy of this widget' or 'Search here'.

Virate: an internal function of the widget that offers a replica of itself

• The code that you need to embed the widget in your own site. There are various ways for the widget to carry this code. It can be directly available, the widget can contain automated methods of embedding or it can link to the Home site where the widget can be constructed.

I will expand on these issues over the next few weeks as I believe it is vital that the widget community understands and discusses these parts of a widget.

Open or Closed Widgetspace?

Scott Karp at the Blog Herald writes about Democratizing The Economics Of Content .

Google’s approach was radical back then and, it seems, still now. Instead of monetizing Blogger sites by controlling the ad space themselves, Google put the monetization tools in the hands of the users, allowing them not only to share in but also optimize the monetization. Of course, Google had the advantage of tapping into its already wildly successful AdWords program, which funneled advertisers by the thousands into AdSense. The reason Google’s approach still seems radical today is that none of the other successful platforms has followed this lead — MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook all still control the ad space on the sites (with Google’s acquisition of YouTube, this may change, of course).

This points up and reiterates one of my main themes for the year: widgets allow the content generators to decide how and when they monetize their own content. Large content silos such as MySpace cannot allow free access for widgets, because to do so would undermine their ability to sell the space. But if you don't allow the content generators to add their own extras (be these monetizing or just for fun or whatever extras), then you are effectively undermining or stealing their own content. The fact that millions of people don't seem to mind this today doesn't mean that they won't tomorrow. As Scott points out - Google has historically allowed users to monteize their own content, because this has historically meant they used Google's AdSense. The upshot of this has been that any other widgets can be used in the same space. It will be interesting to see whether this continues when there are effective competitors to AdSense being used in Google 'properties' such as Blogger.

Kicking off 2007

Rob (aka STUFFLEUFAGUS) kicks off 2007 in style with a posting titled Social Networking as a Widget which really goes to the heart of where we will all be going this year. I recommend going and reading the whole thing.

I think Social Networking is rapidly moving from being site based to being widget based.  Instead of going to a Social Networking Site you’ll bring your Social Network to whatever web application you choose.

... Widgets will move from being useful little tools to completely portable web applications that you can almost literally stick anywhere, from your blog to your Desktop. 

... There isn’t a lot of incentive yet (at least they don’t understand it well enough yet) for today’s Social Networking sites to drive this development.  Instead it’ll be driven by small groups of Widget designers that work together to build an infrastructure that allows Widgets to inter-operate, and to inter-communicate.

Five Things

You Don't Know About Me
Bloggers 'fess up to five things with the tag line 'not a lot of people know that'.
Tagged by Manoj to continue the meme, here are my five:

1. I was absent without leave from the French army for seven years
2. My first business venture was a punk fanzine in 1977
3. I invented the term and concept Cybercafe
4. My mother was born in China and my father in South Africa
5. I was at art college with Damien Hirst

Cheers and a Happy New Year

Blog Title of the Year

Barack Obama Doesn't Know What a Widget Is - Internet Marketing Meets Politics 101.

Barack Obama doesn't know what a widget is, neither does John Kerry, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and I highly doubt Hilary Clinton does either.  I know, the next question is "what about John Edwards?" Well likely he understands the concept of the widget, especially in light of him announcing his candidacy on YouTube, and I'm sure that Robert Scoble has schooled him a bit as well.

Widget Predictions

Here are my predictions for the year. Most of them are self-serving. Or, to put it another way, I wouldn't be in this business if I didn't think some huge changes are going to happen along the way. Here are ten I will (mostly) be helping out with, in no particular order:

There will be many Widget startups

• It surprises me that there aren't more startups in the widget space. Maybe the news hasn't spread as far out as we like to think it has. As 2007 will be the Year of Widgets, it's likely we'll see an explosion of widget specific startups as opposed to startups that have a widget strategy (as, of course, they all will)

The Widget value chain will become clarified

• Maybe there aren't that many startups because the value chain of widgets isn't clear. In the coming year the opportunity will become more clear and more companies will startup to fill the gaps and exploit them.

A Widgetized social network or blog will be launched and become hugely successful

• Some smart kid will write a blog and/or social network platform that consists entirely of widgets. You create an interface by choosing which parts to put where. Suddenly you are in total control of your platform.

Host sites will allow widget embedding via an API

• Automated widget adding currently lets you put your widget in a blog entry but not in the sidebar. Most blog and other networks will allow postioning of widgets in the sidebar via the API.

Marketing widgets will become commonplace

• We're already seeing the start of a flood of marketing widgets, but we ain't seen nothing yet. There are many issues to work through on this one. Look out for huge inventiveness this year and a steady flow of pure marketing widgets.

There will be a virus carrying widget

• Everything comes of age with their own specific virus (Skype, Second Life, Myspace). Widgets will be no exception, and some time during this coming year we will have our first widget virus scare.

The first sites composed purely of widgets will be seen

• This is one of my personal bets. Even without a widget framework being commercially produced, it wouldn't take much to create an entire site from widgets. I'm sure someone is building one even as we speak.

A web widget standard will be proposed and resisted

• Everything has a standard, even if it's only been proposed, writting, argued over and published - never adopted. There are already proposals for desktop widget standards. There will no doubt be one for web widgets. And no doubt it will be resisted.

Several 'web widget' hosting sites will launch

• These will be like Netvibes and Pageflakes, but will be frameworks for 'free range' web widgets to be used in. By the end of the year they will be looking even more successful than the existing sites - asssuming they don't convert themselves into host frameworks.

A truly hybrid Widget system will be launched

• A true method of creating widgets that can exist on the desktop and on web sites will be launched - and the web version won't consist of cutting and pasting code.