Alex and I spent some time talking with Robert Scoble recently. Check out the PodTech
show below:
Once you’ve taken a look at the interview, make sure to check out my demo of both the consumer facing side of yourminis.com as well as the enterprise dashboard:
Some of you may have noticed the
additional syndication options embedded on the flip side of all of our
widgets. For those of you that haven’t seen them there, we’ve added
both Netvibes and Freewebs for easier embedding.
To
add a widget to your Netvibes startpage, simply click "copy me" and
then select the Netvibes logo. Assuming you’re logged into your
Netvibes account, the widget will quickly and easily be embedded into
your startpage - and you’ll be able to further customize the embedded
widget to your liking. The settings will be saved to Netvibes and the
widget will show up just as you’ve configured it.
To add a
widget to your Freewebs pages, simply click "copy me" and then select
the Freewebs logo. You’ll have to login using your Freewebs account
info and then you’ll be asked which page or blog that you want the
widget embedded to. Once you make your selection, the widget will be
added to the appropriate area.
We’ve got more on the way - stay tuned for Vista support as part of our next update!
Also, if you haven’t done so yet, remember to vote for us for CNet’s Webware 100: http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100/2007/browsing.html
CBS PARTNERS WITH LEADING COMMUNITY SITES AND SOCIAL APPLICATION PROVIDERS TO ADD NEW LAYER OF INTERACTIVITY TO THE CBS AUDIENCE NETWORK
Agreements Empower Users to Embed CBS Clips into Their Profiles, Websites, Blogs, Wikis, Widgets and Community Pages
New Partners Signed with Automattic, Clearspring, DAVE Networks, Goowy Media, meebo, MeeVee, Musestorm, Ning, RockYou!, Slide, VideoEgg, Voxant and vSocial
Expanded Deals Signed With Existing Network Partners Including AOL, Brightcove, Netvibes and Veoh
New
York – May 24, 2007 – CBS Interactive announced today that it is
partnering with leading community-building websites and social
application providers to add greater user functionality to the CBS Audience Network. Today’s announcement includes deals with new companies as well as expanded relationships with existing CBS Audience Network
partners. Through these online properties and social application
providers, users can easily incorporate CBS clips into their profiles,
websites, blogs, widgets, wikis, and community pages. This enables them
to discover and personalize CBS content and to use it to communicate
with others. At the same time, CBS gains promotional value online while
learning about its audience.
"Today, we are taking the CBS Audience Network directly to the user," said Quincy Smith, President, CBS Interactive. "In launching the CBS Audience Network
we solidified our position as the most widely distributed professional
content provider on the Web thanks to our great video distribution
partners. We now want to empower our audience to be creative and deepen
their experience with our content by allowing them to share and embed
CBS-provided clips to their blogs, wikis, widgets, community sites and
whatever else gets thrown our way. We are delighted to have so many
quality partners — established and start ups — helping to bring CBS
content to the online community."
The online partners that currently make up the syndication side of the CBS Audience Network, as announced last month, include
AOL, Microsoft, CNET Networks, Comcast, Joost, Bebo, Brightcove,
Netvibes, Sling Media and Veoh. CBS also has distribution deals with
Amazon, Apple and Yahoo, among others.
New online partners adding increased functionality to CBS Audience Network include:
Following the announcement of the Network
last month, CBS content is now available on select partner websites and
over the coming months more content will be added leading up to the
official launch of the Network. As previously announced, CBS
content is advertiser supported and free to the consumer. All content
will be available domestically with select clips and full-length sports
programming distributed worldwide.
CBS Corporation is a mass
media company with constituent parts that reach back to the beginnings
of the broadcast industry, as well as newer businesses that operate on
the leading edge of the media industry. The Company, through its many
and varied operations, combines broad reach with well-positioned local
businesses, all of which provide it with an extensive distribution
network by which it serves audiences and advertisers in all 50 states
and key international markets. It has operations in virtually every
field of media and entertainment, including broadcast television (CBS
and The CW – a joint venture between CBS Corporation and Warner Bros.
Entertainment), cable television (Showtime and CSTV Networks), local
television (CBS Television Stations), television production and
syndication (CBS Paramount Network Television and CBS Television
Distribution), radio (CBS Radio), advertising on out-of-home media (CBS
Outdoor), publishing (Simon & Schuster), interactive media (CBS
Interactive), music (CBS Records), licensing and merchandising (CBS
Consumer Products) and video/ DVD (CBS Home Entertainment). For more
information, log on to www.cbscorporation.com.
yourminis.com has been nominated as a Webware 100 Finalist in the Browsing category.
The
“Webware 100” Awards recognizes the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and
applications that are leading the next wave of innovation.
There
are 10 different categories with 25 finalists in each category. There
are only 10 spots available in each category, and we’re up against some
pretty huge names, so we need your help. Voting is now open and we need
you to go out and vote for us! Make sure to get all your friends to
vote for us too!
The link to vote for us is: http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100/2007/browsing.html
Thanks!
Although it’s a small link off the yourminis.com home page, you can see that we’ve now added a partner page.
The partner page is meant to highlight some of the business benefits
that our partners gain by leveraging our platform. Along with a
description of the offering, our partners get access to their dashboard.
The
dashboard is a one-stop shop for our partners. The initial screen had
a breakdown of all of the widgets that belong to a particular partner,
along with some high level reports including total number of views and
total number of copies for each widget. The partner is able to drill
down into any of their widgets and get real-time analytics. The
analytics package includes enhanced versions of existing reports
(summary, views, views/domain, views/ country, etc.) and new reports
such as number of views by remix (how the remixed versions of your core
widget are being spread on the web), copies, copies/domain,
copies/destination, copies/source and copies/country. Partners can now
select specific date ranges for their reports, as well as using our
baseline intervals.
In addition to using the dashboard as a
gateway into the analytics component, partners can create new API
widgets and edit or remove existing widgets. As a partner, you’ll also
be able to grab your embed code from within the dashboard, submit it to
galleries (coming soon), and blacklist certain domains or specific URLs
so that they are not able to display your widget.
We’ve also
added to our syndication library. You’ll notice the three new
additions on the back of all of our widgets - iGoogle, Live.com and
Facebook. If you like any of our widgets, simply select the
destination site and we’ll embed that widget, as you’ve customized it,
into your desired site. We’ve got more syndication partners lined up
and will be adding them onto the back of our widgets in upcoming
releases.
Finally, we’ve also included a few baseline fixes and performance enhancements. Let us know if you see any issues!
The SEOmoz team reviewed hundreds of Web 2.0 sites, in 41 different categories. They announced their award winners on May 9th, and we’re very proud to say that we took home top honors in the widgets category.
We’re also very proud to say that goowy.com also won, in the online desktop category.
Earlier today we released an exciting
new feature which allows you to remix any widget into your very own!
This allows you to build a slide show with your own photos, and publish
it into our gallery. Or take the youtube widget, search for your
youtube id, customize the look and feel of it and publish that into our
gallery. The possibilities are virtually endless.
You can start
remixing your own widgets by clicking on an existing widget to launch
the details page, and then simply click the "remix widget" button
located at the bottom right of the widget sandbox. The step by step
process will guide you the rest of the way.
To get your creative juices flowing, here’s a "spiderman" widget, created from the base countdown widget.
Yesterday we launched another partner widget with Brightcove.
The Brightcove Video Widget enables you to discover and view
videos from global media brands to independent filmmakers and everything in
between. By default the widget will display titles from the Brightcove Buzz
which is an editorially selected list of the most popular videos on http://www.Brightcove.com.
Additionally
you can choose between 16 content categories such as music, news, & sports
through the menu or use the search box to customize exactly what types of video
your widget will contain.
You can see the widget live below…
Many of you have probably seen a couple of new widgets in our community created by "bestweekever".
We’re proud to say that two of these widgets now live on the Best Week Ever site - http://www.bestweekever.tv/ - and are displayed here as well:
If you visit their site,
you’ll be able to see the ticker at the top of the screen, along with
their posts widget in the right hand side. If you click on "widgets", you’ll be brought to startpage like environment, giving you the ability to interact with multiple widgets.
Thanks to the popularity of the site, we can see that these two widgets will quickly become our most popular ones as well!
Stay tuned for more widgets from our partners in the near future. And as always, please share your thoughts with us!
Here’s a fun little widget built using the new Digg API and our own Yourminis API:
This widget essentially uses the Digg API to create a feed of videos
that continuously play with comments of the Digg users popping up in
the background (you can disable this feature if you choose). You can
also download the videos, filter the comments, and set the category
from the dropdown menu. We’re sure you will all enjoy wasting many
hours of your day watching some entertaining videos from Digg. This is
the first version of the widget, so let us know what’s broken and what
other features you’d like to see!
And don’t forget to Digg the widget!
