As you know, I’m a big fan of Twitter as a way to talk to and listen to your personal community.
Well I’ve been having this conversation with the CEO of Clearspring Hooman Radfar. He’s incredibly active and has a MASSIVE personal community. He didn’t use Twitter.
I think it’d be a HUGE service for him. Yet, he was skeptical.
Well, he’s still seems a little skeptical but now he’s experimenting with Twitter. So all I ask is, follow @hoomanradfar.
Last night some of the Clearspring gang stayed late to decorate the office walls at Central Command with the logos of some of our partners and photographs.
Yep, these are my co-workers. I know you’re jealous.
Yesterday at Clearspring, we launched a redesign of the Web site. It’s AWESOME.
Lots of hugs to our amazing Web and User Experience teams.
BTW – Check out the Developers Page and scroll down to the bottom. There is a photo of this really good looking guy. You may recognize him. 
:-p
So… yeah. Mashable has a great story on this:
Clearspring, the widget company that has broken into the advertising and distributed media realm, has raised $18 million in a Series C round of funding, led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Novak Biddle Venture Partners, with existing investors also participating in the round.
Harry Weller, a partner at NEA, will be joining the Clearspring Board of Directors, as will Steve Case, co-founder of AOL, Ted Leonsis, AOLs Vice Chairman Emeritus (who is now Clearspring’s Chairman), Miles Gilburne, and Nigel Morris, co-founder of Capital One, who also has a great deal of experience in helping companies go public. That’s a lot of new board members to go along with the hefty round of funding, and a pretty powerful set of newcomers.
Check out the entire article at Mashable, “Clearspring Gets $18M to Make Smarter Widget Ads.”
So… yeah! I forgot to tell you all. This weekend I’m on my way to BarCampPortland in Portland, Oregon. I’m currently sitting in airport in Philly. I have a small lay over.
I’m excited. For one, I heart BarCamps. They’re always just a wild ride. You never know completely who you’re going to meet and get to know but you know they’ll be crazy smart and crazy passionate about tech/web-related things, which is AWESOME!
Plus I’m really excited to make this initial foray into the Northwest. It’s not a place i’ve been yet. I hear there is a lot of really cool tech going on up there.
It will also be an opportunity to tell a new audience about all the awesome things that we’ve been doing at Clearspring Central Command. Can’t wait for this!
So… Portland look out! I’m coming your way.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has a brought back a popular exhibit entitled, “Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936.“ It chronicles the history around the time when Adolf Hitler was able to get the Summer Olympics to be hosted in Berlin, Germany.
In addition to have an exhibit at the physical museum building (which I haven’t checked out yet), they have a Web site which carry’s a lot of the same content.
One of the REALLY powerful portions of the online content is audio interviews with athletes of that era and the decisions they made or were made for them around their participation in the games.
If like me, you found the content to be powerful, you can easily share the audio content with your friends because it is in a widget. They use our Clearspring widget platform for distribution of the widget. 
(Full Disclosure: I work for Clearspring and used to work with a team member at the USHMM.)
Above is a screenshot of the widget. I would have embedded it right in here but WordPress.com doesn’t allow the embedding of content from third-party sites, unless you’re a few special sites. *sigh*
Regardless, this is a GREAT example of breaking your Web site a part into pieces and allowing people to spread amongst their communities. I’m anxious to hear what kind of results the Holocaust Museum gets.
Widgets really do make everything better. For a long time, widgets have made beer better. Now widgets make the environment better too.
ABC and the Arbor Day Foundation are doing this REALLY cool campaign. ABC picked 9 of their widgets and every 10 times someone watches a video on one of the widgets a tree sapling will be planted.
Use widgets, watch videos, and get trees planted. That ROCKS! Check out the post I did on the Clearspring blog and go use the widgets. It’s for the environment man!
Here at Clearspring, some of our developers did a proof-of-concept using YouTube’s player user interface API and the Clearspring’s Launchpad Advanced to see what YouTube would look like with our share menu. It’s pretty sweet. Check it out.
I’m totally pumped. I’m headed to Miami on Wednesday. It’s so frickin’ cold in Washington DC. It’s 82 degrees F in Miami right now. 
I’ll be at BarCampMiami and Future of Web Apps (FOWA). At FOWA, they have a killer speaker lineup like Kathy Sierra, Kevin Rose, Gary Vaynerchuk, and others.
If you’re going to either of those events or live in the Miami area, drop me a line. I’d love to meetup.
Last weekend in California there was the 2008 DEMO conference. The conference serves as a launchpad for new Web startups. It’s a great opportunity to see what the new thing is going to be.
Over at the GigaOm blog, they boiled down the four biggest themes that came from this year’s DEMO conference. One struck my eye:
Componentization of the web
The web’s full of pieces: static images, YouTube clips, Facebook widgets and Flash plugins. Startups want to let users rework these pieces their own way.
This is exactly what i’ve been saying. When people find a Web site or piece of content they like, they want to be able to take it with them and do stuff with it.
This theme is also why I joined the widget platform company Clearspring.
So if you create online content, how are you allowing your users to grab a hold of and do stuff with the useful components?
