The Guardian does it cheap and simple with 3rd party widgets
Quietly, while millions have been spent on the recent relaunch, someone at The Guardian has been savvy enough to do some things the simple - and cheap - way.
Take a look in the outside column of the Lost In Showbiz blog, and you’ll see ‘Our faves’ - a feed from the journalists’ del.icio.us account. You will find something similar in Jemima Kiss’s PDA ‘Newsbucket‘ and on other blogs like Deadline USA.
A nice touch here, though, is ‘Your Faves’, which invites del.icio.us-using readers to tag relevant webpages ‘for: Showbizspotted‘, which it will display here. OK, it’s hardly intuitive - I misread it at first and simply tagged it ’showbizspotted’ (which would be a better idea) - but anyway…
Below that is a Google gadget, of the ‘Latest Fashion and Showbiz blog posts’ pulled from blogs outside of The Guardian. Click on that link and you find a Yahoo! Pipe aggregating and sorting feeds from five blogs…
The point?
Del.icio.us, Google gadgets, and Yahoo! Pipes. None of them owned or built by the Guardian. But all of them do the job required, and well - for nothing. Culturally, this is a hard thing for many news organisations to do (”But we can’t control it!”), but increasingly, it’s something they’re learning tends to work better than unwieldy bespoke software. It’s cheaper - and importantly in these times, much, much quicker.
Look elsewhere on other blogs and you’ll find that Roy Greenslade has his Google Calendar widget, while the News blog and Mortarboard blog, among others, have a Technorati-powered blog-specific search rather than using The Guardian’s own (on the Technology blog the same search box also displays reactions from elsewhere in the blogosphere). The Science blog has a Twitter balloon widget (sadly broken) that pulls tweets from MarsPhoenix; and Deadline USA has a Vodpod widget of ‘bookmarked’ videos.
It’s a cheap and creative way to add dynamic content to your site for free, and it’s surprising that more news websites aren’t doing it. Is yours? And what widgets would you love to see used?
Written by Paul Bradshaw - Visit Website
6 Comments, Comment or Ping
paulb
(submitted but deleted by spam filter)
Just giving you some Times Online examples of things we do for free:
Blog Widget powered by Widgetbox & Yahoo Pipes (18m impressions in the
last couple of months!)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/
Head-to-head interviews powered by Sightspeed & Google Video
http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/twofer_interviews/index.html
Surveys powered by Google Docs:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/camilla_cavendish/ar
ticle4257060.ece
And more and more…
Tom Whitwell
Communities Editor
Times Online
Aug 4th, 2008
Kevin Anderson
Paul, I created most of the widgets, but we’re spreading the joy. Jemima created her own Twitter widget, and our Arts team is using the same widget for Edinburgh.
Our blogs developer was tied up with other work at the time, but I wanted to add new functionality to the blogs. I’m not a programmer, and it was quicker for me to do a little ‘cut and paste coding’ than wait until we had the development resource.
It also ties our blogs into other networks on the web. It’s one of our goals to not be on the web but of the web.
best,
Kevin Anderson
Guardian Blogs Editor
Aug 4th, 2008
paulb
Thanks Kevin - I had my suspicions… (although the Pipes account under Kevin A was the real giveaway)
Aug 4th, 2008
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