Tag: gossip
BBC sports widget includes content from other sites
by chris on Feb.06, 2009, under Widget Sightings
Paul Bradshaw at Poynter Online in the UK reports that the BBC recently launched a new sports widget that reports on rumors related to soccer – “football” over there – players’ trades and transfers between teams – “clubs” over there – when will they learn to speak English? 
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:
- Guardian Unlimited
- Mail Online UK
- Daily Record
- The Telegraph
- The Independent
- Football 365
- Sky Sports
- The Times
- Mirror.co.uk
- The Sun
- Sporting Life
- TEAMtalk
- Setanta Sports
- Daily Star
- Daily Express
- Sunday People
- 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.
