It’s easy to be enthusiastic about my role in helping evangelize Smarter Planet, IBM’s effort to help the worlds systems — including food production, healthcare delivery, energy production, traffic and water management — become more instrumented, interconnected and, ultimately, intelligent. That’s a vision that most people not only understand, but want to see fulfilled.
To fulfill my mission — putting social media to work to make Smarter Planet real and relevant to people around the world — I’ve found Widgetbox to be the kind of smarter service that has helped me …

Inside Facebook, the leading voice on the world’s largest social network, covered Widgetbox’s Facebook Connect Integration today.
The article (read it here) covers three integration uses cases live on Widgetbox today:

Logging into Widgetbox using your Facebook account
Publishing widgets, ratings, and comments to your wall and news feed
Support for using Flash widgets in-line in the news feed

The article is an excellent summary of our recent Facebook Connect features and we look forward to rolling out more value in the weeks ahead.

MSNBC is using Widgetbox Pro to aggregate celebrity tweets regarding the passing of Michael Jackson.
if (WIDGETBOX) WIDGETBOX.renderWidget(’916be377-a1ee-4ad7-bd6d-ed233ecfb990′);Get the Pipes: MJ Tweets filter widget and many other great free widgets at Widgetbox!
MSNBC used Yahoo! Pipes to build an aggregated feed of key celebrity twitter feeds and then Widgetbox to build and serve the widget content onto their page.
Thanks to MSNBC!
Click here to try Widgetbox Pro.

Unable to make it to CES 2009 in Las Vegas?
Still want to follow the latest tech and gadget news?
Have a blog that covers the tech world and want to add CES news to it?
I can affirmatively answer yes to each of the above… which is why I put together three CES 2009 Widgets from top tech blogs: Gizmodo, Engadget and CrunchGear.
Each of the widgets was constructed using the new Blidget Slideshow functionality. To create similar Blidgets:
1. Enter the Blidget Creator and input your blog or favorite RSS feed
2. …

For anyone interesting in widgets, Bob Garfield’s AdAge article on widgets, Widgets Are Made for Marketing, So Why Aren’t More Marketers Using Them, is well-written and worth reading. 
Quick snippet follows, but check out the full article.
“Branded widgets are the refrigerator magnets of the Brave New World. These compact, portable little software apps — from video players to countdown clocks to makeup simulators — are inexpensive to distribute, free to the user and (often enough) distinctly useful. At a minimum, they carry an ad message wherever they go. 
That’s at a minimum. …