Music Widget?

As children, we watch educational programs on how business works and learn that making "Widgets" is what you will do as a job when you are an adult.

I didn't think they were serious.

I thought that "Widget" was just some placeholder name for another product, like "cars" or "ice cream" or even my dream job making comic books or movies. But alas, the joke is on me. Essentially, I actually do make widgets for a living.

The strangeness of saying this is really kind of funny what you think of it. In fact, I think some of those old business shows used the name "Don" as in, "Don has to sell four widgets today. If Don sells five widgets instead of four, how much more profit will he have?"*

All laughs aside, and because I know that some of you who stop by to read this little blog also sell widgets for a living, I wanted to share this with you.

I found this album on iTunes named "Widget" by the Reverburritos. If you like surf instrumentals, this one will surely make your day. Click here to visit the iTunes store for a listen, it's actually really, really good.

UPDATE: I had to add this. Just too funny. Proves my point to a "T"




-Don

* You really need more information to answer this.

Free movies for presidents day!

To celebrate President's day I'm cluing you in to a little secret:

Movies are free... Not all of them of course, but enough of them to have some fun this Monday - and possibly a lot longer than that.

I've created this list of free Public Domain movies as a SpringWidgets RSS video widget. Just click on the little "TV" icons to play the video.

Have fun.

Get this widget!

If you want to make one of these on your own, keep checking back. I'll put up a tutorial when I get the chance.

-Don

Google video Comedy videos in a widget

Get this widget!

Widgets

A few of you might have picked up that the project that I hinted at a while back involves a new paradigm shift in content delivery called "widgets". For those of you who don't know what "widgets" are, the simple explanation is that they are small windows that sit on a page and display content from another location.

The longer explanation is that widgets can be extensions of existing business models, sites or ideas. They can be whole business models or sites in and of themselves and they can also be the entire reason that a site exists. YouTube was built on the success of it's video player "widget" and it's ability to be pasted, without restriction, around the web. YouTube would hardly be who they are today if they had limited all viewing of their content to visitors of YouTube.com - there are dozens of sites that did that earlier and better than they did when they started.

In short, YouTube built a 1.65 BILLION dollar business because they allowed the sharing of their content on other sites through the use of a widget.

Widgets can obviously be built by the site owner to extend a business. They can also be built by a third party trying to make a buck by cleverly extending someone else's business. With widgets, imagination is the only limitation to what can be created if you have free reign and content to share.

Most widgets that you will find are likely going to be parasites, built to siphon traffic from a much larger host, like MySpace or Blogger. These web based parasites, similar to parasites in life, can be good or bad for you, assisting you in useful ways like the bacteria that help you digest your food or feeding off you at your expense like the flu or e-coli.

It's interesting that in nature, almost all living creatures need parasites present in order to be healthy. What is more interesting is that the arrival of "web 2.0" has caused websites to become living, breathing beings that are beginning to emulate life in almost every way, including the support for symbiotic systems of parasites and viral pathways. Trying to remove or hinder viral web content or "parasites" on the web will likely result in the same kind of reaction that treating viruses and parasites in real life does, occasionally killing or injuring the host during the process of treatment.

Personally, I'd like to think that this evolution of the web is a good thing and that widgets are the best example of how we interact with the new web. Mainly because they allow users to take what they want, put it where they want and customize individual web experiences in ways that might just make the old web portals just a bit afraid of what's coming next.

- Don

If you look on the right side of this blog, you will see a few widgets. A clock, and RSS reader in which I've placed my Digg stream, this blog, my Myspace blog and the top 100 google videos feed amongst other things (which may have changed by the time you read this - buyer beware).

A very long, strange week (and an even longer post)

The last few weeks have been very strange. We've been working on something big for a while and a couple weeks ago, news of what we are working on reached the public. I'm not going to comment on the accuracy or lack thereof of what has been written, I'll leave that up to you to decide for yourself. What I will do is tell you that my team has been running around on a cloud for a week now and it feels great.

The counter to this is that in the same amount of time, I received two pieces of bad news in my personal life. First, my sister called and told me that she "found a lump" and was going into surgery (she is doing well). Second, a very good friend recently decided that she would stop treatment for the cancer she has.

My friend is in the medical field, and has been in treatment for some time, so I trust her judgment that this is the best path for her - But nonetheless, it's hard to hear. So I spent last weekend and the early part of this week in Omaha visiting my sister and my friend being depressed by that news and oddly elated by work.

A little background: My family has a history of cancer. My father died of brain cancer after a lifetime of *never* being sick or hospitalized, my mother had cancer and the effects of it more or less her whole life. My first loss to cancer and coincidentally my first experience with death was my grandfather who died of lung cancer when I was 8. I've grown numb to the emotional aspects of losing someone to cancer and I have a pretty good idea of what is going to kill me.

So what is happening with work? With the exception of the last couple weeks, work has largely been a bit of a pain in my butt. Something about 16 hour days, needing to work miracles on a shoestring, and having to daily defend every idea we have from being screwed up by people who really should know better. In short, work has been sucking of late. (That being said, we barely spend a dime, miracles are being worked every day, and I never get tired of arguing a good idea.)

The articles that were written about the product that we are working on, "TheSpringBox" were fantastic reviews when you consider that our product is still very beta and is not supposed to be public at this time.

Better yet, the feedback that was written in those articles was just glowing and indicates that "real" people might really like what we have built. Even the very critical Digg crowd had a couple nice things to say and the criticisms are all things that I completely understand given the view they have had of the product. (Although we did find out some insights that are being addressed as I write this)

No need to take my word for it, take a look at the clock in the upper right of this blog - that is one of our widgets, the RSS reader is ours as well.

So the next few weeks will be both interesting and challenging. I'm sure that work will return to being a pain, but for the time being I will enjoy the break. In the meantime, I just wanted to thank everyone that I work with for doing such fantastic work.

As to my personal life, well, that's harder. I wish that I could fix everything for my sister and my friend, but I know that I can't do that. I wish both of them my best and I'll try and do whatever I can whenever I can.

Hmm... just got dugg.

Something that I have been a part of (with some really great guys and gals) just got dugg. (For those of you who don't know... visit Digg.com.) It was a bit shocking to see this climb. I was watching it thinking we dodged another bullet, but then - just like the IBM commercial, the numbers just started climbing.

I have to tell you, it feels really good. The team is buzzing and everybody is excited.

With the 8 people a day that visit this site, I'm sure that I'm not contributing anything to that flow by posting this but I had to say something.

I work with some really great people!

Thanks guys.



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