TechnoCloud

Do people think widgets grow on trees? Actually, it’s the other way around with an unusual, but laudable, promotion from ABC and the Arbor Day Foundation whereby for every ten times a video is viewed through the widget is viewed a tree will be planted.

While I’m not a fan of the execution of the widget which I find overly complex, I’m a supporter of the cause, so have embedded the widget below. Click on ‘grab it’ on the bottom of the widget to do so yourself and select ‘videos’ from the option.

You can check out progress by clicking on the yellow leaf icon on the bottom right of the widget.

Update: boo, it’s stopped at 100k trees. Not bad going all the same.

Update 2: As it’s slowing down the site loading, the widget has now been removed.

Like Elvis, Bob Dylan seems to have no limit to the number of Greatest Hits variations he can release. I can remember as a child listening to my parent’s Dylan compilation in the car some 20+ years ago and the old master is at it again with a single CD or ‘deluxe’ version with 3 CD Digipack no less.

Passing over the fact that most of the old favourites are there yet again, a piece of viral marketing for the album caught my eye.

The viral, also available as a Facebook application, allows you to create your own version of the famous ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ video where Dylan nonchalantly holds up lyric cards. In a neat piece of creative you can add your own lyrics to the cards and watch Dylan flick through them followed by a plug for the album.

You can share it via Facebook, email the website version to a friend (with the classic subject line ‘Bob Dylan has a message for you’ or embed it on your blog or social network after the slightly annoying step of having to provide a url and email address.

Interesting to see that BBC News is trialing the use of a Flash player which will allow users to embed video clips into their web pages (T&Cs plus code for the video below here). So, in the spirit of a trial, let’s give it a go using a report on the current UK alternatives to the ‘i-Hype-Phone’.

Easy to do for anyone familiar with embedding code and works fine for me in Wordpress and on MySpace. Work OK for you?

Good post from Danny Sullivan breaking down what Google’s forthcoming Universal Search means in visual and descriptive terms.

In short, Google will be incorporating into the default search engine rankings page results from across it’s various search engines, e.g. video, images, books… This presents all kinds of challenges in terms of user interface, information overload and access to the nugget(s) of information you were searching for in the first place.

Web users have seen these changes coming in various guises for some time as Google has tweaked the interface in various markets. At different times I’ve seen images, maps, blog and news results dripped into the results page. The next evolution looks to make those tweaks live across the search engine.

It’s Google’s own version of the wider widgetisation of the web where different data sources are pulled in from across the web customised to the user’s individual needs and preferences.

Now you can add TechnoCloud as a widget to your blog or space courtesy of Widgetbox’s Blidget. Widgetbox also comes with a built-in stats package which allows the publisher to see not only subscriber numbers, but also the number of views of a particular widget. The widget can also be customised in terms of size, colour and function.

As a test, I’ve just setup TechnoCloud as an RSS feed using the Flickr toys broadway poster image from earlier in the week. To get it click on ‘Get widget’ at the bottom of the widget.

One initial observation. I originally installed the widget on my sidebar, but couldn’t help noticing that the page took much longer to load, so decided to restrict it to this post. Perhaps I’ll be sticking to straightforward RSS in the future…

If it’s taking an eternity to load, let me know in the comments and it’ll be consigned to the widgibin.

Google Personalized Homepage, now surprisingly renamed the unoriginal iGoogle, is opening up gadget production beyond developers with ‘make your own gadget‘.

Now people without development or web design skills can use a wizard to create a series of personalised gadgets to embed into their iGoogle and share with others. Gadgets (or widgets depending on platform and prevailing wind) are being democratised across the web.

We’ve progressed from fixed content elements, to select your own ‘official’ gadget, to add/create a developer gadget, to now add/create your own ‘laymans’ gadget, it’s all part of reducing the barriers to entry of contributing and sharing content that we are seeing across the web.

Expect to see the wizards grow in number and sophistication across gadget (and other) platforms as web users grow more and more comfortable with personalising content consumption and the tools that enable them to do so become easier to use and build.