During Widgetwebexpo, I noticed that there was alot of discussion about paid spread of widgets and almost none about organic spread of widgets. This caused me to change my presentation. There were companies represented there and widget teams that I felt could really benefit from some simple techniques of how to spread a gadget. So I made up a new presentation the night before.
The slides are just the main points of what I discussed, but you might want to check them out.

I would also like to highlight a great presentation about organic widget spread from Google I/O, I spoke of it earlier, but now the entire presentation is up. I recommend watching it.

And here is a great article about getting into widgets, and highlights Widgetbox, one of my favorite widget platforms.

Their widget building tool allows you to create professional looking widgets without knowing Flash or other technologies, and even provides quick templates that get you started remarkably quickly. In fact one of their templates is the Hellboy II widget…

To create widgets is surprisingly simple. You basically can learn the whole thing in a few minutes to build a nice looking feed type gadget. It might take a little longer to create a good looking multi-feed type of gadget, but not much more effort is required.
One of my initial problems I have with these types of builders is that they often are heavily branded for their own purposes.
One of the reasons I am writing up Sprout right now is that they just announced that they will allow you to remove their branding and are currently offering their early adopters free “pro” accounts that remove all Sprout branding from their widgets. Is is a very smart and cool move. One that other widget platforms can learn from in my opinion.

These gadgets are spread via Gigya (“grabbable”) and are flash based.
To learn more, or to build a widget, head over to the Sprout website.

I am in Brooklyn and everything I know about Brooklyn I learned from a Beastie boy song and I drank a few beers and it may just be me, but it seems as though I am damned good looking and everything is sparkle-ly.

Oh, the conference thing, WidgetWebExpo has a good mix of developers, advertisers, and curious clients. A good mix, but I find myself rewriting my presentation a little (I will present tomorrow) to be more welcoming to different types of folk. Lawrence of SexyWidget is a really engaging speaker, I was seriously impressed by his session, I highly recommend him as a speaker. He would be just like me if I were tall, sober, responsible, and effective.

MediaForge, wow. I like. I think that it is very likely that MediaForge will be a big force. More on them later….

I attended most of the availible sessions, and I wish I would have had the foresight to have brought someone else here to cover the other track. Great sessions all around, and I am pleased to be here.

I am meeting some really great people.

Not as great as Lisa, but pretty good nonetheless. I have to go back to work now. Snif. Back to re-writing.

Or use the iPhone version with video streaming of the event. Find out more at the conference blog

Also of note, my comments are turned back on!

WidgetWebExpo

Look for speakers from comScore and Forrester Research, as well as from Nokia, Motorola, Gigya, Clearspring, Sprout (my Hawaiian neighbors), MediaForge and more.

And let’s not forget widgets are like a start-up candyland, so naturally there are a few venture capitalists about like Fred Wilson from UnionSquareVentures, and great talents like Scott Rafer (former CEO of MyBlogLog), and Fleishman-Hillard to name some more.

Many CEOs are speaking at this event. WidgetWebExpo has a really good flavor of media savvy companies joining the the very real world of rich media marketing and advertising. Social

If you haven’t seen the latest speakers for the upcoming WidgetWebExpo, you might want to look again.

May 12th – Palm Springs (personal stuff)

May 15th – Sunnyvale, CA – Yahoo HQ – I will be at the Yahoo campus for an evening of drinking, er, I mean developer stuff

May 28th 29th – Google I/O -  I am looking forward to several goings on there, especially the MySpace/Open Social stuff, and of course the Google gadgets stuff as well.

Jun 3rd 4th – Seattle, WA – SMX Advanced - I will swing by Seattle for the SEOmoz party, and also maybe get a networking pass for the event.

Jun16th – New York, NY – WidgetWebExpo – I will be doing a session there on Widgets and SEO

I also want to mention that Smx Advanced will be having a developer day which programmed by Vanessa Fox, who has over 13 years of experience building websites, documenting APIs, and reading comic books.

Vanessa is starting a new thing Nine by Blue, which looks at the relationships between development, SEO, and online marketing silos and how the data from each of these areas can be used holistically to learn more about customer behavior. She also is features editor at Search Engine Land, a leading online journal covering the search industry. She previously created Google’s Webmaster Central, which provides both tools and community to help website owners improve their sites to gain more customers from search.

In addition to the above, she is also quite hot

There is a real benefit for companies to send their developers to this event, and I want to add that I personally think that if you are a developer and you are tinkering with the idea of broadening your horizons, this is a good event to go to. If you are thinking of working with me I would say the developer days would be required. (hint-hint)

Although this developer day is naturally orientated towards SEO, there are some very important basics to understand before starting a large project that will be useful to just about any development team out there.

My compliments to Vanessa for starting this.

That about does it, after that I will be back on the trail.

Ivan Pope, the founder of Sniperoo is presenting the WidgetWebExpo in New York on June 16th and 17th. This conference is his American version of the Widgety Goodness conference that he ran in the UK.

Except this is bigger. Way bigger.

I will be participating with this conference in a few ways, and can’t give out concrete details yet, but I will be speaking at the conference and I am hoping to do a day long, hands-on workshop for creating and promoting your website / business via gadgets where I can really take an active part in the participants needs and hopefully have everyone involved with my workshop leave with a gadget that they know how to promote and expand on.

For more details about the conference go to Ivan’s post at Sniperoo which highlights what is going on. The WidgetWebExpo has some neat things coming out soon so I recommend keeping your eyes on it. More to come on this soon.