For a year or two now, I've been minorly obsessed with polls and surveys as a method of lightweight interaction that engages casual users of your website and also can get you some really fun data to play with. I've also mentioned at a few WordCamps that a polling plugin is one of the top 10 WordPress plugins in the world. Polls are really popular with WordPress users.

As we started to look at building out our own service for this, it became more obvious that, while on the surface it's a very simple problem, there's a lot of hidden complexity and opportunities for some really powerful features under the hood. There are probably a dozen companies addressing this space right now, but as we started to survey the space I was struck by how often I'd see this "PollDaddy" thing pop up.

Two guys in Ireland with a quirky company name were cleaning up with some of the largest and most respected websites using their service on a daily basis. They weren't the biggest, but they had the high end of the market. It seemed to be the WordPress of the polling space.

For about six months, I've been trying to figure out how to create a plug-in that would associate any stream (such as Flickr, Ma.gnolia, and Twitter for example) with a given post, so that a post from a particular day in April 2008 would have photos and Tweets and links from that same day, or a user-determined close time frame.

The idea is to collect time-related objects, as one can easily do when hand-rolling a blog post in HTML, but as one presently cannot do with automated blogging software and social networking applications.

Imagine a blog post from five years ago that talks about your band, and is associated with Flickr photos of you and your band as you looked five years ago-not because you manually inserted the photos, but because time-linkage between web applications is possible.

Imagine a blog post from five years from now that talks about your wedding and is associated with Flickr photos of your wedding-not because you manually inserted the photos, but because time-linkage between web applications is possible.

Google Australia this morning showed a new iteration of Google Maps, launching about a week from now.

First up, if you know how to embed a YouTube video in your blog, you'll be able to embed Google Maps in your website, Google promises.

It'll be as simple as cutting and pasting a bit of HTML code into your website, just like a YouTube video.

The embedded maps have the full functionality of Google Maps -- they provide satellite view, map view or hybrid view, and users can click and drag the maps around.

To embed a Google Map, you pull up the map you want to embed--it can be a location, a business, series of driving directions, or a My Map you've created--and then click "Link to this page" and copy and paste the HTML into your website or blog. The embedded map will be fully interactive--you can drag and click or zoom in on a location, and view it in map, satellite, and hybrid modes,

The expected change in approach is a reaction to the success of rival Facebook, which last month unveiled a similar step to open its network to outside developers. Although it has less than half as many users as MySpace in the US, Facebook's approach has won it strong backing from other consumer internet companies, which hope it will give them an easier way to reach the network's 27m members.

More than 1,000 applications and services are already available, letting users do things like publish slideshows of personal pictures to their Facebook pages, or add a box that keeps track of when their favourite bands are playing concerts nearby.

"The [Facebook] platform is interesting," Mr DeWolfe said in an interview with the Financial Times. He argued MySpace's current technology approach gave its users many of the same benefits but said: "We'll probably offer users the choice of both."

The aim was to attract more online companies to create services for MySpace's users. "We'll be bringing in more developers."

Dulles-based AOL has also launched a new widget that allows bloggers, Web site owners and consumers with social networking profiles to easily and anonymously instant message with site visitors. The widget is directly integrated with the owner's instant-messaging buddy list feature, letting site, blog and social networking profile visitors initiate an instant-messaging conversation when the owner is signed on to AOL's instant-messaging service.

A widget owner's online presence status is indicated with a highlighted icon and screen names, and identities are protected through customized owner and visitor aliases.

MySpace will acquire Flektor, a just-launched service that allows users to create widgets from photos, video and text, according to two sources with knowledge of the deal. This comes right after the news of MySpace’s pending acquisition of Photobucket last week for $250-$300 million. This will be a much smaller deal, in the $10-$20 million range, possibly with an earnout.

Flektor competes with more established startups like Slide and RockYou, and launched only a few weeks ago. Still, insiders say that the company has developed a killer set of tools to create slide shows as well as much more elaborate widgets that include audio, video, photos, text, effects and transitions. In our testing v. Slide and RockYou, Flektor came out way ahead in usability and features.

It's an odd acquisition, though, since Photobucket also has a slide creation product that competes with Flektor.

Technorati already offers bloggers an array of widgets. They mostly are blog-content related, such as listing top searches, link counts, and tags. Now, the company seems to be considering introducing widgets that display ads.

Or so you'd gather from a survey I just received (as a consumer -- not a journalist) from Technorati.

Coincidentally, I had a long chat last night with Technorati co-founder Peter Hirschberg. He didn't breathe a word about anything widget-related.

A trusted source tells me that the online social networking site Facebook plans to open its tightly controlled site to outside widgets, allowing users to embed outside audio, video, and other content onto their profile pages for the first time. Ironically, this move comes just as MySpace tightens up its widget policies, meaning that the two sites could come to resemble each other a lot more than they do now.

Blog Top Tags Widget
Display your top tags with the Blog Top Tags widget in a beautiful cloud formation (or the top tags of any blog). Copy the code snippet below, replacing {URL} with your blog URL. Note: when you first install this widget on your blog, it will take us a few minutes to build a custom widget with your blog's top tags, but then after that we'll keep it up to date for you.

Now he is about to blow it all apart. Within the next few weeks, all of those little boxes (Krim calls them "modules") will become exportable as widgets to other Websites as well. "I love destroying what I build," he says.

It's Krim's way of contributing to the budding widget economy. Netvibes has 10 million active users, If you figure that each one has created at least five modules per page, that's a lot of potential widgets. Krim declares:

"Widgets are killing the Webpage. It is time to go to something else. We are entering the widget economy. We are going there no matter what."

Netvibes is also developing a Universal Widget API that will let widgets talk to one another and synchronize among themselves. And in April, Krim plans to add social networking features to Netvibes, such as the ability to subscribe to your friends' widgets or send them a cool blog post or video directly to their Netvibes page.

The second piece of news almost fell under the radar. Netvibes rival Webwag has quietly enabled a feature that lets users post widgets from Netvibes and Google IG to a Webwag page. They want to keep it quiet until the feature is officially ready, but I love the idea. Once all the startpages support the same widgets, how do you choose between them?

There are many culprits. First, we have a lot of third party widgets, ads and analytics apps running on the site. They are often the cause for slow load times. FM Publishing, our advertising network, often slows down the site and then other things pile on to crush it.

Today we had three problems. FM is updating their software and caused massive . We switched to the new version of wordpress which is clearly not bug free. And on top of that we have a number of plugins that are acting weird on the new wordpress software. One of them took us down earlier tonight.

Another culprit is MyBlogLog, which we've had to strip off the site a number of times because of slowdowns.

On his Web log, Pastor Hyatt, the leader of the Evergreen Community in Portland, Ore., has woven in widgets, or mini-applications, that show a selection of book covers from his personal library, present the most recent posts from some of his favorite blogs, and serve up random quotes from the television show "Arrested Development."

"You start small, and it's kind of like an addiction," said Pastor Hyatt (his blog is at bobhyatt.typepad.com). "TypePad has a whole section of widgets, and they're adding more all the time," he continued, referring to a popular blog-hosting service.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, about 12 million Americans now maintain a blog. Widgets are elements, often in the left or right columns of a blog, that enhance its usefulness or aesthetic appeal. (The term "widgets," confusingly, can also refer to compact applications that operate on a computer's desktop.)

"Widgets pull content or services from some other place on the Web, and put it into your personal page," said Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures in Manhattan.

Yahoo is not saying what it paid for Mybloglog, but knowledgeable sources said it cost a little over $10 million for the company, which first offered the service in July. Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product strategy at Yahoo, said Mybloglog will likely remain branded as a separate entity, but Yahoo users will be able to register on it with their Yahoo password. The reader communities will soon be able to access Yahoo services, like the Flickr photo site or the Yahoo Answers information service, to their groups.

"This closes the loop between readers and publishers," he said. "Every publisher wants to know his readers, and the readers want to find out about each other. It's the power of implicit networking."

Web advertisers, of course, want to know about everybody. Mybloglog is currently available on about 45,000 blogs, according to company chairman Scott Rafer, and has registered the photos and personal information (like the address of their blogs) of about 33,000 readers. Rafer also said it looks at about 1 million readers of blogs a day. Its most popular blogs are, not surprisingly, on technology subjects, but also on real estate – making the user information valuable to multiple advertisers.

The more important kind of widgets are those that let you take data from one Website and embed them into another. Sometimes these are called Web badges or snippets, but they let you remix the Web to your liking by adding, say, a customized search box to your blog, a YouTube video to your MySpace page, or create a whole page of widgets on NetVibes by pulling in your Gmail, favorite RSS feeds, and photos from around the Web. If you use TypePad, there is a whole gallery of widgets you can add to your blog, including your linkroll or a one-click video chatting button.

The reason Web widgets are important is because they are the most concrete manifestation of something else that is happening. The Web is splintering. Centralized portals don't matter anymore in an era when Google and Digg will filter the ever-changing Web for you much more efficiently. Or you can filter it yourself with a few well-chosen widgets, and bring it to your own particular corner of the Web.

Some are already calling 2007 the -year of the widget. But ever since Websites started opening up their innards a few years ago and giving away their data through open APIs any programmer could access, the widgetization of the Web was already on its way. Now, nearly anyone can grab a widget and slap it onto their blog, NetVibes or MySpace page.

Widget startups will spring up that not only disseminate information to an atomized Web, but use their widgets to gather information as well in order to recentralize and repackage it.

Google Gadgets are miniature-sized objects that offer cool and dynamic content that can be placed on any page on the web. A directory of "Google Gadgets for your webpage" is now available for webpage owners everywhere to browse and select gadgets for their own pages, at http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open.

"Now anyone can have a great-looking website with automatically updating content," said Adam Sah, Google Gadgets Architect. "By making Google Gadgets available for you to add to your webpage, we're working to connect developers with enthusiastic consumers and to make information universally accessible and useful to the individual user."

With almost no effort and at no cost, webpage owners can add complex, dynamically updating content to their own websites using Google Gadgets. Because there is such an enormous variety of Google Gadgets to choose from, webmasters also have a great deal of freedom to select only the gadgets that will best complement their own page. There are games, news clips, weather reports, maps, and more.

Their first offering is a horoscope widget that updates itself with content from theAstrologer.com. They’ve done a good job: it's nicely designed and you don't even need to cut and paste any code - you can instantly add it to MySpace by entering your MySpace username and password (this is a feature that we’re seeing more regularly).

In the case of MySpace, the ability to simply click "add" when you hear a song you like and then you are broadcasting that song on your own page was pure genius. It brought the musicians to MySpace because they saw the viral aspects to music on MySpace. The more musicians came to MySpace, the more value accrued to being a member of the MySpace social network.

The founders of YouTube must have thought a lot about that trick because when they made their video player embeddable on a MySpace page, the MySpace community reacted swiftly, putting YouTube videos on their pages the way they put music on their page. They find something they like and they show it to their friends. Not a link, that's old school, they showcase the media right their on their page.

you have more blog friends than 'real life' friends.

you're blogging in your head before you fall asleep.

your out of town husband and you converse in your blog's comments.

you tell your friends and family things like, "I'll ping you and you ping me back," or "Okay, I want to trackback on your last comment..."

you blog in your head an event that's happening at that very moment!

Want this badge?

We love to laugh - so now we're preparing the world to bLaugh! This is the (un)Official comic of the blogosphere - colorful, satirical, and comical. Expect parodies of "A-List" bloggers all the way down to the meme of the day - no holds barred. Brad Fitzpatrick is bLaugh's artist, and Chris Pirillo is the writer. Our strip is exclusively sponsored by a single company, GoDaddy. We have a bLaugh feed for you to suck down - and we give you code to display our comics anywhere! Of course, all you ego-maniacs should be watching closely - because you're likely the ones to be parodied on a regular basis. If you blog, or your name (brand) is getting tossed around in the blogosphere, you're on our radar.

The gapingvoid widget lets you display Hugh's latest cartoon on your web site or blog. When your visitors click the cartoon they'll see a full size version of it (try it for yourself on the right).

Just select whether you'd like to filter out cartoons with adult language, then copy and paste the code below to place the widget on your site.

We integrate directly with MySpace. All you need is a MySpace profile and NooZ does the rest. We get your photo, your display name, and automatically connect you to your friends. (Because of this, you must have a MySpace profile to use NooZ.)

We put a NooZ ticker on your MySpace profile. This is a flash widget that can display the latest item from ANY page on NooZ, such as the items you vote for, or any category, or even any RSS or Atom feed.

We let you see what your MySpace friends are reading. You can quickly check out items your MySpace friends submitted or voted for, both on NooZ.com and in a widget.

Today Babel Fish is hanging his shingle here at Yahoo!, debuting Yahoo! Babel Fish across our properties worldwide. For those of you new to Babel Fish, you can visit babelfish.yahoo.com and translate text or web pages across your choice of 38 language pairs, such as English => Korean, Dutch => French, and Greek => English.

The Babel fish is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

The audio comment window contains a Java applet which controls the audio recording and previewing capabilities. After your visitor has recorded their audio comments, they'll provide you with their name and email address and send it to our servers.

At first, my traditional side immediately thought, this is a very very bad idea. Honestly, all I could think of was being forced to listen to, not simply read spam. But is that overblown? Spammers probably wouldn't take the time to record messages?

Still, even without the spectre of spam floating greasily above the room, my traditional side still wins. I would still rather read comments on this blog. So it would have to be a specific kind of blog where you would want to hear them.

OR you can even use the entire system in "reverse" and send yourself audio comments, then mark them public, and let the rest of your site visitors listen to them - sort of like "Quick podcasting."

Moodviews reveals patterns that follow on weekly, monthly and even yearly cycles. For example, the label "drunk" becomes increasingly popular each weekend. The label "stressed" appears less during summer months and more towards the end of each year, perhaps because of end-of-year work deadlines or the stress of visiting in-laws.

On Valentine's Day, there is spike in the numbers of bloggers who use the labels "loved" or "flirty", but also an increase in the number who report feeling "lonely".

The latest addition to Moodviews, a program called Moodsignals, tries to explain match these blogospheric mood swings to current events. It identifies emotional peaks by comparing recent label usage with records of previous use. When it finds a spike, the program picks out less commonly used words from relevant blog posts in an effort to identify the cause of the emotional change.

Moodviews reveals patterns that follow on weekly, monthly and even yearly cycles. For example, the label "drunk" becomes increasingly popular each weekend. The label "stressed" appears less during summer months and more towards the end of each year, perhaps because of end-of-year work deadlines or the stress of visiting in-laws.

On Valentine's Day, there is spike in the numbers of bloggers who use the labels "loved" or "flirty", but also an increase in the number who report feeling "lonely".

Loved, that's what many bloggers felt around Valentine's Day 2006, while there were increased levels of flirty-ness and loneliness

A broad spectrum of moods is observed around New Year's Day 2006, with unprecedented levels of nostalgia, drunkenness, contemplation, and hopefulness

Unseen levels of happiness around Christmas 2005.

Thankful, hungry, and full around Thanksgiving 2005

Scaredness around Halloween 2005

Mass increase in the level of worriedness around major weather phenomena, such as Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005

Excitedness around global media and culture events, such as the release of a new Harry Potter book on July 15, 2005

Mass increase in the level of distress and sadness after terror attacks, as witnessed by the response to the London bombings on July 7, 2005

2. What is Blog HOT or NOT?
The idea of this site is twofold. One reason is to get some sort of ranking system on weblogs just like we have for people's pictures. The other reason is to create a system that helps weblog writers find an audience, and for that audience to find new weblogs.

The other reason this doesn't quite suck on the same level as 3Bubbles is that they're not trying to put these boxes on blog posts (which, as I mentioned, rarely have the traffic to sustain these things). The interface is nice and the functionality is good - you can also subscribe to chats via RSS. Nonetheless, this is just a bit of tech-wizardry on top of an old idea - will it be enough to distinguish them from the crowd?

Essentially you create a profile, upload a little photo, and if you show up at a site that has Mobber-code (tiny bit of Javascript really) embedded, then you can be visually identified in a little slider bar. You can click to browse people or chat with them. Sort of trying to add visual depth to the community of readers on the site.

A taxanomy that is visitor generated

A navigator that shows pages by context

You have access to a nice tag cloud

More internal traffic as users click on tags

Valuable inbound links from our directory to your site

We can build tags automatically from search engine traffic

XML API access to your tag data

Think of gravatar.com as a dictionary that associates email addresses and avatar images. When you leave a comment on a weblog and provide your email address, the weblog can use your email address to look up your avatar. Since the dictionary is available to anyone, a single avatar image can represent you across many different weblogs.

It's a list of keywords taken from the news feeds you specify. Larger fonts indicate a higher prevalence for an individual keyword. Using Cascading Style Sheets, you can customize almost every aspect of your TagClouds to make it match your website.