The football widget uses a vaguely-defined “web search technology” (Yahoo Pipes?) to pull soccer-related gossip from a variety of daily news sources, including:

1. Guardian Unlimited
2. Mail Online UK
3. Daily Record
4. The Telegraph
5. The Independent
6. Football 365
7. Sky Sports
8. The Times
9. Mirror.co.uk
10. The Sun
11. Sporting Life
12. TEAMtalk
13. Setanta Sports
14. Daily Star
15. Daily Express
16. Sunday People
17. News of the World

The move is apparently a continuation of the BBC’s dedication to more deeply integrate with the global news media ecosystem. The widget includes a second tab of news from the BBC itself, deftly positioning their own content in a featured position, so users who are initially interested in football gossip can get hooked on BBC Sports. It also offers sharing links (powered by Clearspring) that have become commonplace on widgets, allowing it to be virally swiped and distributed to new pages.

The BBC has described their soccer widget as a 3-month experiment based on the enduring popularity of BBC Sports’ “football gossip” column.

According to their site:

We will evaluate the feedback and statistical analysis captured during the trial prior to deciding whether to develop the product for use in a wider operational environment[.]

You can get the soccer widget here, and the BBC is soliciting feedback on the widget experiment from the same page.

1. A standard photo gallery widget
2. A standard slideshow widget
3. A standard tag cloud widget, with a twist – it also grabs technorati tags and auto-extracts additional tags from your content
4. A standard feed content widget (good for easy content syndication!)
5. My personal favorite, a “Live Activity” widget that displays a live, constantly updating, feed of recent views to your site. Every time the widget loads on a page, it detects the reader’s geographic location and referring page. That information then appears in the widget feed on all of your pages, letting readers see the most popular content on the site.

Wowzio is still in private beta, but if you request an invite you can probably score access to their widgets builder. I can’t wait to see how the Wowzio widgets stand up in a death match! Many of the standard Wowzio widgets would have a hard time standing up to some of the widgets that Danny and Mike have built, which integrate photos, videos, blog posts, and more into a single widget, but the Live Activity widget is a powerful offering in the widget space.

In addition to a Flickr photo widget that displays images about rain and a YouTube video widget, both of which appear on every page within the blog, other widget highlights include:

• A Britney Spears news widget,
• a beauty salon tutorial widget,
• and a movie trailers widget.

Keep up the widget madness, mystery widget blogger!

Haylie’s expertise extend far beyond just widgets – for some stellar examples of the breadth of her skills, check out KADeveloper.com.

Here’s another one from Widget Maestro Mike Sommers:

Mike explains:

“It’s cool because it allows me to easily import all my activity from Flickr (where I store my photos), Twitter (where I save souls) and WordPress (where I blog) into my SommersPeople community profile page… Write once, publish everywhere!”

So there’s 1 widget that combines Flicker, Twitter, and a personal blog. Mike then pasted it on his social network profile page, just for good measure.