One underutilized method of gadget spread is Internationalization. Google gadgets that are only listed in the English language are missing tens of millions of potential users. The Google gadget directory, when seen in Italy, prefers to show Italian language descriptions and titles. They are more useful to Italian users. Also consider that when an Italian [...]

The same Google gadget can be displayed in different languages depending on who is looking at it and what country thay are looking at it from. Gadget usage is reported differently depending on where you are looking at it and what language is specified. You may have a million people using your widget in another [...]

I will be speaking at PubCon about widgets on the Wonderful World Of Widgets session. This will be my first officially “We Build Pages” speaking gig! For those of you who remember my adventures of last years PubCon you probably know that I do not like to be awake during the day, so if I [...]

Not to be confused with iGoogle themes, iGoogle tabs are the way people organize thier personal homepage and therefore, their Google gadgets. When a users clicks “add a tab”, something new has been happening… Ever wondered how many people are using the Google Webmaster Tools gadgets? Now you can know, because after you click the [...]

If you read this blog and you are a developer, you probably should let me know I often have work on neat projects. I have project work for… Open Social developers (javascript) Search Monkey (php / xslt) Facebook (php) Be part of some of the most popular and innovative applications on the web. I should [...]

Yahoo Searchmonkey widgets are now live in the search results. What does this mean? It means that Yahoo has beat Google to third party widgets in search results. It means that those of you who ignored SearchMonkey can no longer do so. I think in a larger sense what it means is that Yahoo is [...]

If the theme usage numbers reported by iGoogle are correct, then iGoogle has reached 100 million users. That is alot, and means Marisa Myers can start saying “over a hundred million users” to me instead of the old and drab “ten’s of millions” that she has always said to me when I ask her for [...]

Both Greg Sterling’s article and the Wall Street Journal article about this same subject suggested that Google will allow preroll ads on YouTube merely for revenue reasons, I disagree. I don’t believe Google is just fighting for YouTube revenue. I believe Google is fighting for an entire new ad revenue sector and for the survival [...]

Lively is Google’s new 3D virtual world with social aspects. Here is what a room looks like embedded on a page… To try Lively out for yourself, just enter the above room (you will be asked to login with Google), and look around. Or go straight to Lively.com Note: The login window from Lively gadgets [...]

With iGoogle updating to different people at different times, it might seem there could be problems with viewers being able to be use the gadget correctly. The iGoogle blog article with the solution for this explains that with just an extra content div you can solve this. While the article concentrates on gadgets you are [...]