Widget Death Match

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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:

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.

It’s finally here – Widget Death Match round 2!

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.

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.

Haylie over at DotcomCowgirl sent me a link to this holiday widget over, well, the holidays. It’s a fun use of interactive widgets to build an immersive, themed environment that also shows us yet again that Haylie is a master of the KickApps platform and online social interaction in general.

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

Here’s a new Widget from the KickApps App studio, built by widget adept Danny M. It integrates multiple flash games (one for pirates, one for ninjas) into a single widget:

Ever wanted a simple Twitter widget, or a Flickr widget that’s styled to match your personality? How about a slick blog widget that you can post on MySpace, Facebook, or any other social network? Why not get all 3 at once, via the KickApps App Studio?

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.

Check out the 2008 Holiday Beauty Guide from Makeup Makes Me Happy – a great example of how someone can build a dynamic, interactive shopping experience with some widgets and feeds.

On Wednesday, on his way home from work, Mike sliced his leg open on a fire hydrant in a freak accident. He came back to the office bandage the 4″ cut, then headed home to get stapled up in the ER, but not before he created this widget (warning: if you click the widget, you will see something very gross):