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 syndicate content from the Smarter Planet | Tumblr site much farther and wider than I ever imagined. The widgets I was able to build from the feeds of topic-specific content have helped us more than double our reach in just a few months.

What’s more, with minimal technical expertise I was able to easily customize the design and functionality of each widget — Smarter Cities, Smarter Energy, Smarter Healthcare (as well as the Analytics Album which cover this new frontier of advanced business analytics, a very hot area) — and even succeeded in translating them into Facebook Apps.

Smarter Planet is about the great leap ahead as the digital and physical worlds mesh and converge. About an Internet of trillions of connected devices, tags and even software objects like the staggering array served up by Widgetbox. In the end its about all the ways in which we all become smarter as knowledge flows.

I hope you’ll share the Smarter Planet story by sharing these widgets with your networks. And thanks Widgetbox for making my job smarter, easier and more effective.

Jack Mason
Strategic Programs & Social Media
IBM Global Business Services
Twitter IDs: ibmbizanalytics, jackmason

The article (read it here) covers three integration uses cases live on Widgetbox today:

1. Logging into Widgetbox using your Facebook account
2. Publishing widgets, ratings, and comments to your wall and news feed
3. 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 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.

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. Choose the wide “size”
3. Pick your favorite theme
4. Select “Slideshow Layout”
5. Check “Include Summaries” and “Include Images”

this works great for blogs that have image-rich RSS feeds… like the widgets below:

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. At a maximum, the widget is something like the magical connection between marketers and consumers, not only replacing the one-way messaging long dominated by media advertising but vastly outperforming it. Because online the link is literal and direct, and along its path, data of behavior, preference and intention are left at every step. Oh, and your target consumers actually go out searching for your branded gimcrack. Oh, and they display it within easy reach. Oh, and they pass copies along to their friends and associates. Oh, and because they’ve been turned on by a friend, they are hospitable and receptive recipients. And, oh, in case this didn’t quite register the first time I mentioned it, the barriers to entry are preposterously low. “The money is a joke,” says Hillel Cooperman, ex-Microsoft big shot and founder of small Seattle software-development shop Jackson Fish Market. “It’s a rounding error in the marketing business.” 

Thank you to those who voted for Widgetbox and congratulations to Snap Shots, who placed first, and to Rockyou, who placed third.

MeDeploy, which recently launched at DEMO, enables the film and television industry to launch digital distribution across websites, social networks, blogs or anywhere else, opening new and untapped revenue streams. MeDeploy’s powerful yet easy to use “Distribution API” is the first of its kind and allows digital video sales and distribution via widgets.

The widgets allow for in-widget video views with built-in e-commerce functionality.  

We first got curious about the possibilities last May, when we blogged about how we noticed a surge in the popularity of Obama widgets as his campaign was closing in on the Democratic nomination, while activity on Hilary Clinton widgets started to decline. Read the post here.

Interest in Widgetbox as a resource for data on widget activity and trends continues to grow, and last week on Profy, Svetlana Gladkova mentioned Widgetbox as the best source for widget-related info in a story on how Obama is using the power of social media: “When I need information on this or that widget I usually go to Widgetbox to get a sense of how active people are in installing certain widgets on their blog or profiles so I have decided to take a look if I can find some campaign-related widgets.”

So, what does our data say about the latest activity in the political widget scene? We took a look at all the Obama and McCain widgets on Widgetbox over the weeks leading up to both party conventions. Obama widgets continue to outnumber McCain widgets, by a ratio of almost 3:1. Further, Obama widgets were active on 5.5 times more domains and received 6.5 times more impressions per day than McCain widgets.

We then looked at the geographic reach of the Obama and McCain widgets and found that 27% of all the traffic to the Obama widgets came from 150 non-U.S. countries while the McCain widgets received 11% of their total traffic from just 95 non-U.S. countries. Most surprising however, is that the Obama widgets received more traffic from OUTSIDE the U.S. than the McCain widgets received from WITHIN the U.S.

We also took a look at the popularity of Obama and McCain widgets by U.S. city and found that while Obama widgets outperformed McCain widgets in nearly every city, they led by the greatest margin in Obama’s home city Chicago with 7.8 times more traffic, and had one of the narrowest margins in McCain’s home city Phoenix with only 2.1 times more traffic. Pretty interesting…

hi5 is one of the world’s largest and fastest growing social networks. All of us at Widgetbox are excited to partner with Hi5. As Ramu, Hi5’s CEO,  noted, “Widgetbox’s large community of developers provide millions of hi5 members a variety of new widget options enabling a more immersive and engaging social networking experience. hi5’s popularity in countries around the world meshes with Widgetbox’s global reach.”

Well said.

For “Cage Match: Battle of the Widget Business Model” we’re getting a great line-up together for a honest, much needed and no holds barred discussion about the various possible monetization schemes for widgets and how, why, and even whether they work. We are the first to say there has been a lot of hype about widgets over the last couple of years, and now it is time for the various companies in the space to get serious and have viable businesses! So far, on this panel, we’ve got representatives from Widgetbox (yeah, you knew that already), Gigya, iWidgets, and Sprout. We think this panel is going to rock. Vote for it here!

For “Widget Warriors: Dominating the Web by Building It” we’re getting an awesome line-up here as well. We already told you about Matt Basta – widget maker and videographer extraordinairre. We’ve just added none other than Wayne Lee, the founder and creator of Bunnyhero Labs. Yup, if you like those awesome cyber-pets, and you can’t stop feeding the animals their favorite goodies and making them jump all over the widgets, then vote for this panel! This is going to be a great talk from independent, in-the-trenches widget makers – their tips, tricks, and paths to success.

We’re pretty fired up about both of these panels, but we need your help to make them happen. Please vote today!

PS – we’ve also made some SXSW voting widgets that are configurable to any panel. Grab them here and here and put them on your site!

PPS – Don’t know anything about SXSW? Grab their blidget and keep up to date on all the happenings with this awesome festival: