Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp’s Web 2.0 blog

A lot of my friends have been talking about the Guitar Hero and Rock Band video games but I haven’t really gotten into them yet.

The other day I found the Guitar Hero Widget over on one of the Wired blogs.  Inside the widget, they give a mini version of the game.  It includes three songs.  It’s really cool.  Instead of using a plastic guitar, you’re using your keyboard but none the less it’s fun.

It gives me a taste of the game and would get me potentially excited about buying it.

Making a widget is SOOOO genius for a video game company.   If i’m a big fanboy of the video game, I’d send this widget to my friends who were yet to be converted so that they too could get a taste.  It empowers word of mouth advertising, which is the most powerful advertising technique.

So… Go play with the widget.

(Note: I would have embeded it here but I use WordPress.com and they don’t allow me to embed third-party flash. *frown* )

Yesterday, Robert Scoble announced the redesign of his blog.  That’s awesome. My question is: if he wouldn’t have said anything, how many people would have noticed?

I go back to my thesis: No one cares about your Web site.

I care about the content and functionality that your site provides me.  I experience the Web through feeds in Google Reader and widgets in NetVibes.  I do 90% of my enjoying of content in those worlds.  I typically don’t notice your fancy designs or user interfaces.

We’re moving away from a Web page world to a Web of data that gets aggregated together.

The Web is getting broken into pieces.  If you write interesting things, I’ll grab the piece of the Web site that is your content (your RSS feed) and put it where it’s more useful to me.

What do you think?  How often do you look at Web sites vs. feeds in Google Reader?

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.

Brian Clark at Copyblogger has a great post where he asks the question, “Will RSS Ever Go Mainstream?” He goes on to say…

Over two years later, email is still very much alive… But the public at large either doesn’t care about RSS, or doesn’t know they’re using it (a la My Yahoo, etc).

So, I’ll say it… RSS will NEVER go mainstream.

Try explaining RSS or news feeds to someone outside of the tech field.  Yeah, it’s not going to happen.  Yet, RSS has become the defacto standard of every Web site on the planet.

The RSS feed is the data.  It is the content which people enjoy but it’s not a format which makes sense to anyone.

This is part of the reason why I got into widgets.  The face of the RSS feed is the widget.  In the next 2 years, every Web site, every piece of Web content, and every piece of online functionality will be broken apart into useful components (or widgets) that users can take and do what they want with.

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!

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?

As I mentioned earlier, Wednesday I started at the widget platform company Clearspring Technologies.  As part of my duties as Developer Community Manager, I’m going to be making contributions to Clearspring’s Community Blog.

On Thursday, I made my first post.  Here’s a snippet:

Upon entering our office complex in the morning, I was greeted by our local fire fighters.  Our office was without power because apparently a tree  fell on a nearby power substation.

When you’re a Web-based startup like Clearspring, it’s pretty hard to get any work done when there’s no power.  So what do you do?  You setup a mini-golf course around the cubicles and offices.   It was fun and a great way to get to know some of my co-workers.

There will be many more posts so stop by, drop me a comment, and say hello.

BTW, Here’s a fun sticker I found on our office Red Bull container.

So… it’s official.  I’m now the Developer Community Manager at Clearspring Technologies. There is a lot of work to be done and everyone here is very excited to see me get started.

Here’s to a new year and new opportunities.

Friday night and all day Saturday Washington DC held the inaugural WidgetDevCamp. 

It was a gathering of local geeks to talk about the issues relating to widgets and other modular social applications ( like Facebook apps.)  There was also a lot of widget and social application hacking.

On Friday night we gathered to talk about the overall goal of the event, we discussed high level issues and uses related to widgets, and also brainstormed widgets we wanted to build. Before and after there was also lots of time to hang out and relax.  It was a good opportunity to get to know others who were interested in the space.  I think there were 50-60 people who were there on Friday night.

On Saturday while only 30-40 people there, we had folks leading GREAT discussions.  There was everything from how to use widgets with the social graph, an overview of the Clearspring platform, widget best practices, desktop versus Web widgets, JavaScript vs. Flash vs. Flex for widgets, Facebook app development 101, and much more.  It was great!

Also we had a number of folks who spent a lot of time Saturday doing some coding.  We had guys writing widgets, Facebook apps, and some even playing with Google’s Android mobile platform.  At the end of the day on Saturday, we gave the different developers time to demo what they’d been hacking up and the demo’s caused some really great discussion too.

One conclusion that I walked away from the event with is that all too often people work on their various projects and home by themselves but they’ll have a TON more fun if they can do it with or around other people with like interests.  We need more co-working in Washington DC.  I’ll write more about this later.

If you’d like to have a WidgetDevCamp in your city, please e-mail me at justin AT clearspring DOT com.  I’d be happy to help however I can.

Note: First photo was taken by Jason Garber.  The second photo was taken by me.

UPDATE: You can see more photos at the WidgetDevCamp DC Flickr Group.  If you took photos of the event, please join the group and add the photos.

So WidgetDevCamp DC was this last weekend… it was awesome!  Here are some photos.  I’ll be writing more about it later.