I've been taking a look at what widgets people have in their blogs. I'm fascinated to see what people put in their sidebars. As part of our research we've built a tool that looks at thousands of blogs and tells me what the average number of widgets present is (and a lot more besides). It's eight. I can peek at any site that our tool checks to see what the actual widgets look like and I think I can tell a lot about a site from the widgets present.
So I thought I'd write up the blogs of a bunch of bloggers, the Web 2.0 rich and famous and just cool people that I like to read, to give an idea of what they are carrying. This is a totally arbitary list - I'd love to hear who has good widgets in their blog.
Widgets of the Rich and Famous (Part 1)
Robert Scoble
Scobelizer
Scoble has recently moved to PodTech and continues to blog manically in a Wordpress blog. Scobelizer carries only two classic widgets - Amazon and Barnes and Noble widgets for his book, Naked Conversations. However, the page also carries a bunch of url links in the right sidebar.
Although these are all text links, i.e. not classic widgets, they could all be made into Snipperoo modules and managed as widgets. You can create a module from any html or even straight text - it's just a simple way of looking after stuff in your sidebar. This would make it easy to add and remove them and to re-order them in the list without hacking around in the page code. And as at least two of them are broken links, Robert might want to take up this simple management option and sort out his sidebar.
Funnily enough, the Blogroll link in his sidebar links through to his Blogroll page, which has a bunch more widgets and looks a lot more experimental. But it also says he works for Microsoft. So take a leaf out of our book - make even the credits into a widget and keep them updated centrally.
Google Analytics is also present as an invisible widget. Snipperoo handles invisible widgets, no problem.
Wordpress blog
Widgetrating: 5/10
Fred Wilson
A VC
Fred blogs his life as a vc and he's a big widget fan. He's stated publically that he knows he has too many widgets in his site, but he's an experimenter.
And his site is certainly a hotbed of widgets: 14 in the right sidebar and around 20 in the left. It's hard to be specific as some of the stuff is Typepad native and some widgets are in more than once - is that one or more widgets?
Anyway, the issue with such a fecund approach to widgetisation is that it gets painful to keep putting them in and then taking them out again. You can so easily lose things in a big page of code. I've discussed this with Fred and I'm about to give him a test Snipperoo account, as he has to be the king of widgets.
So what's in there? Some lovely stuff, with a focus on 2.0 tools, adverts (Fred raises money for charity) and music. One of the most interesting is the Root Worms double widget that shows Fred's recent searches.
What I'd suggest to Fred? Well, he has a family photo at the top left of his blog that he likes to change regularly - I'd make that into a widget. I'd also try out regular rearrangements of my widgets to see what difference it made.
Of course Fred is also carrying a bunch of invisble widgets, including the LID URL widget (the first multi-protocol identity provider) and things from Tacoda, del.icio.us and Blogbeat.
Typepad
Widgetrating: 8/10 (well widget loaded, bit chaotic)
Mike Arrington
TechCrunch
TechCrunch has become a professional blog with a slew of adverts. That's not to say it doesn't use standard widgets - it does. Also, the ads themselves, wherever they originate, will be code widgets themselves. A reasonably widgetised site. In addition to the TechCrunch ads, it contains a Eurekster Swicki search widget
and a Sitemeter widget that links to statistics for the site. The blog also uses Google Analytics and (Google) Measuremap invisible stats widgets. Plenty of empty space down the right hand side of the page could be used for an interesting range of widgety goodness.
Wordpress
Widgetrating: 4/10
John Battelle
Searchblog
John Batelle is writes a great blog, wrote a great book and runs a great startup, so it's not surprising that a lot of his widgets are self-promoting. He's got a lot to promote.
He has about twelve widgets in the sidebars including, surprisingly, Google ads. Also EFF Bloggers Rights campaign
Blogprinting.com (buy a print copy of the blog - excellent)
and a Creative Commons widget
Movable Type
Widgetrating: 9/10 (lovely balance of widgets)
Tom Peters
tompeters!
Tom is famous for writing all those inspirational management books and changing the way some people look at management. My favourite (and probably the only one I ever read properly) is The Pursuit of Wow. I think it's because it recommends hiring anarchists (or is it artists, either will do for me).
Tom's blog is obviously professionally produced and carries a string of beautifully designed internal ad widgets. But surprisingly, he's managed to sneak a few more personal widgets in around them, which shows how this stuff can get under your skin.
He carries a personal Flickr widget at top right of his page. A bit further down pops up a widget I've never seen before from Suggestica looks like a beta suggestions site (doh!). Then, lots more house ads and a huge blogroll. I have a particular view of Blogrolls - more on this later. At the bottom of the left sidebar a strangely isolated 'Feedster Top 500 blog' widget. And at the bottom of the blog, a search box from Freefind.
In the invisble widgets stakes, he is using the new(ish) Crazy Egg tracking widget and a Technorati widget.
There's probably a lot more he could do creatively with this space, being a marketing guy. But I guess he's constrained by the need to market his own stuff.
Don't know what's driving this blog - maybe something homebrewed?
Widgetrating: 3/10 (no real effort to widgetize)
