Widget Death Match

Danny’s quickly become a master of the KickApps App Studio, recently releasing yet another multi-faceted widget. In this case, it’s a combo widget that shows videos, blog posts, and message board discussions from KickDeveloper.com, where Danny helps moderate the message boards and answer questions about, among other things, the KickApps App Studio.

Wowzio has recently listed a series of very cool “beautiful blog widgets“. The widgets make attractive use of dynamic photo content and their functionality includes:

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.