Media Widget = Content Syndication

A lot of activity is going on right now in the industry regarding widgets and how and why to use them. It seems daily another announcement is coming out about how someone is making available content to by shared on blog sites, Facebook, MySpace, and other web sites in an effort to improve the user experience on the site and at the same time monetize the additional audience exposure those sites bring for both the content owner and the publishing web site.

Widgets are mini-applications that sit inside a website, desktop, or mobile device and serves up content and functionality in a highly interactive manner. One of the key features of this approach is the ease at which a web site owner can incorporate this content and functionality into their site to provide improved user experience options to their audience.

Content, brand and web site publishers need to develop this technology further in order to leverage their assets more affectively. Up until the widget the relationship that they needed to build was very intrusive. Costing time money and resources that couldn't be recovered through advertising dollars or other financial arrangements. Widgets are changing that, the integration costs associated with this approach now makes content that was valued in niche markets readily accessible without the costly integration and management overhead that is typical of the previous approaches.

We are working through our Labs project code named Syndicatr on different approaches to using the widget approach for syndication of content across the web. What is interesting so far is the wide amount of content including video, games, graphics, blogging, and text that can be combined in this approach to allow an almost unlimited amount of options in making this content available on many distribution channels. This is made even more intriguing by the analytics and advertising opportunities it provides while improving the ability of the content owner to keep this content vibrant and relevant to the audience.

See our "Online Syndication Widget Whitepaper" on the topic for more information and stay tuned, this space is evolving at light speed.