Before you consider the contestants, a reminder of the results of Widget Death Match round 1: despite his (now discontinued) awesome interactive Star Trek game, Simon lost by concession to Mike’s irie Reggae Widget.

Now, Mike’s back. Initially challenged by Andrew “Wags” W., Mike put together this slick all-in-one widget. Facing such an impressive display of widgetosity, Wags never got up the guts to enter the widget octagon, but young Danny M came out from nowhere with 2 different widgets to challenge Mike: a pirates vs. ninjas game widget and his own brand of all-in-one features.

Now it’s up to you, the judges to decide! If you like a widget, leave a comment in the respective post. We’ll add up the comments and declare a winner soon.

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.

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.

Widget Death Match Round 2 is scheduled for Tuesday, 12/16, and people are getting nervous. Just a quick reminder of how Mike won round 1: through the semi-legitimate practice of spamming the judges with multiple widget entries. As Mike said:

Will this one win? No? How about this one? Or this one?

Ethics aside, the Mike’s tactic makes sense. The KickApps Widget Studio allows Mike to crank out eye-popping Widgets in a few minutes, and he tipped the vote with this (eye-popping) Marissa Miller Harley Davidson Widget:

The clincher was his page that allows you to add any YouTube video to this widget, a great demonstration of widgets’ flexibility and opportunities for personalization.

Mike will be back for WDM Round 2, so stay posted for more Widget Death Grips!