A Wider Net

Yep, it’s two bits of web jargon in one - a jargonlomerate. Your widgets, apparently, can have badges. And while you may be thinking (as I was) that you “don’t need no stinkin’ badges”, this free service from Yahoo is a nice way to promote the availability of your widget and make it easier for people to use it.

For example, here is a badge for a widget we recently built to keep attendees and prospects in touch with news about a consumer trade show:

Marketing guru Seth Godin created Squidoo, now he has created one of the best lenses found there - a list of the most overused business cliches. A good list to remind us all to find better ways to communicate.

The Encyclopedia of Business Cliches on Squidoo

Widget Mania points us to dotSUB - a service that allows you to upload a video, add closed-caption text, then allow other users to translate the original text into any other language. The video becomes available to the masses in the language of their choice. This could also be considered a solution for the hearing impaired.

They certainly aren’t the first company to provide tools that allow us to add captioning, synchronized text, or even language translations, but they are the first solution I’ve seen that allows these translations to be produced by other users - similar to the way the Wikipedia grew. It does, of course, have the same pitfalls as Wikis - the users can place whatever text they want. Most of would never know if they translated “O, Say can you see” into “George Bush is an idiot” in Swahili. But the benefits revealed in this sample video greatly outweigh the risks:

I have not had an opportunity to explore this for corporate use. There would have to be controls over who was allowed to translate and who was allowed to view the content, but if there were, I bet there would be a long line of corporate communications and marketing people happy to meet their localization requirements using a tool like this.

Hooray for Widgets! You just have to love these cute tinkertoys of usefulness.

Yahoo has released Yahoo Widgets 4.0 (you may recall when Yahoo bought the widget system called Konfabulator). New improvements include superior performance and a Vista-like docking system that works on XP computers.

Widgets, a staple of the Macintosh OS and the new Windows Vista, are little applications that can users can select and sprinkle around their desktop or join together into a little tool conglomerate. They perform all kinds of functions ranging from the silly (cartoons-of-the-day, vote for best buns) to the useful (news feeds, alerts, information displays, calculators, sharing tools). Why am I getting this feeling of Deja Vu?
Recently we’ve seen a surge in branded widgets made to promote a service, like Priceline, or a product, like an upcoming movie or album. They provide useful functionality in return for a consistent place on your desktop. These are the electronic equivalents of a stapler branded “Remember to drink Coke at lunch” sitting your real world desk.

Some branded applications go beyond the mere “widget” and are called BDA’s or Branded Desktop Applications - but that’s another post for another day.

Yahoo Widgets - who says OS X and Vista should have all the fun?

Thanks again to Techcrunch for highlighting this release for us.

Michael Stelzner, a prominent white paper author and consultant, wrote about a new RainToday study into the state of lead generation. From his post:

A new study by RainToday revealed that 74 percent of professional services companies ranked white papers as an excellent source of lead generation.

In addition, white papers are one of the top two marketing strategies businesses plan on implementing in the next two years.

White papers make a lot of sense for B2B marketing because they position your company as a thought leader and they foster deep conversations that can lead to new business. One thing that isn’t clear to me is whether these papers are getting read. I’m sure Mr. Stelzner has plenty to say on that topic on his blog. It comes to mind that Forrester Research discovered several years ago that their study briefs, which were only a dozen pages or so, were considered too long. Their solution was to boil the study down into a 3-5 minute video summary.

That, to me, is a more compelling way to leverage all the work that went into the white paper. Record a 3-5 minute video and post it on your website and maybe in one or more aggregation sites. The video player should be embeddable on other people’s blogs, so they can better reference your example. B2B customers will appreciate the short-form because it shows sensitivity to their time, and it makes your company look more tech savvy.

Having just written that, I expect a call from my marketing department any minute now about a couple of my white papers…

The New York Times has a brand new reading application based on WPF, or Windows Presentation Foundation, formerly called Avalon. This technology will be a component of Windows Vista, and promises to bring some interesting new capabilities for windows application designers. I believe the iBloks application, a video, image, and music sharing tool, is also built on WPF. This is a good glimpse of the types of slick applications coming down the road for windows users, many of which will certainly change the way we communicate electronically. Follow the link below to download the free beta (which may require you to set up a free nytimes.com account).
First Look - Times Reader

Originally spotted here.