Archive for the 'Sidebar Widget' Category

Blogging on blogging swicki

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 15 May, 2007 in Blogging, Recommendation and Sidebar Widget. 0 Comments

I’ve added a blogging on blogging swicki to Eurekster. Cool, but what is a swicki? According to Eurekster:

Swickis are a cross between search engines and Wikipedia - the community can add, delete and improve the results.

First impressions are that it provides nothing that mediawiki (the platform used for wikipedia.org) can’t do - but it can do more: swickis search across a wide range of sites (including blogs). Not only that - and here is where it gets interesting - every reader can add their own links into the results, changing them. The swicki will still give results based on relevance, but user-voted popularity can also alter results. Not only that, but you can ask questions and provide answers to those of other people. I can’t pretend to understand the full implications of this concept but I am willing to play along to find out :)

I’ve put the blogging on blogging swicki tag cloud equivalent into my sidebar on this blog. If it sounds like you, I would encourage you to have a look. If you want to use the swicki tag cloud in your own blog, please follow this link.

Widgetise your blog with widgetbox blidgets

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 8 May, 2007 in Blogging, Recommendation and Sidebar Widget. 0 Comments

I’ve just created a latest posts widget (AKA blidget) for this blog over at widgetbox. I like the idea of putting a Latest Posts widget for one blog on another.

It raises the possibility of a dynamic blogroll - instead of a static link list of “my favourite blogs” it could be “What’s new on my favourite blogs”. I’ve put an example together at http://facibus.com/widgetbox.html - very rough it is too. Imagine rather than just a few of my blogs it was your full blogroll, or the last ten postings of your technorati favourites list, or random blogs on a certain topic. It starts to get towards a solution to the problem I posed at the end of my posting on the information architecture blogosphere - something that takes the technorati top 100 blogs in a given tag domain and presents some additional information on them.

I’m not sure that this counts as linkfarming - widgetbox doesn’t present the posting links in spider-readable form - although I am happy to take advice on this.

LinkedInABox

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 8 May, 2007 in Recommendation, Sidebar Widget and Tips. 0 Comments

LinkedInABox gets my cool sidebar widget of the day award (it just edged out What is your blog worth?).
Like a lot of other Knowledge Worker 2.0 folk I use LinkedIn for social/business networking (in my world the two are pretty much the same). I did hesitate to type my LinkedIn user email/password into the LinkedInABox link builder, but I am glad that I did - you can see the result at the bottom of my sidebar.

I’m not looking for work right now, but if I was, I’d be beefing up my LinkedIn resume/history and putting this sucker wherever I could. Its cool, it works, it does what it says it can, and it has some nifty interactions. Try it.

How much is your blog worth?

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 7 May, 2007 in Blogging, Monetization and Sidebar Widget. 2 Comments

I saw the following widget over at Matt’s Musings just now:

how-much-widget.jpg

It is a fantastically catchy idea: deep down, even if you don’t run adverts or sell t-shirts or any of the other monetization things, don’t you wonder what your blog is worth?

I was curious, so followed the link to Dane Carlson’s Business Opportunities Weblog. It uses some research by Tristan Louis to change technorati ranking data into a $$figure - what research, and which ranking data, it doesn’t say (and if anyone knows, please tell me).

So if Matt’s Musings is worth USD9,032,24, what is my burgeoning blog empire worth? According to Dane’s calculator:

And Steve Collins’ acidlabs blog is worth a whopping USD86,939.16. Cool :)

I’ll recheck periodically and report back here. A mashup of this calculator with current top 100 technorati blogs would make for an interesting page - regardless of whether the math is right behind it or not, it is entertaining.

UPDATE: Effective 20 May 2007, this blog is now worth a nominal $28,791.54 :)