Recent posts in my Widgets Category

November 27, 2009

London IA Mini 4: Max Gadney - "The glass-bottomed boat"

Early in November we held the fourth London IA Mini conference evening. Zebra People sponsored the night, which was hosted by EMC Conchango. In the first part of my round-up of the evening, I had some notes and a video clip of Max Gadney's opening talk. BBC History archive - 'What is the way in?' Max was talking about how information design needs to be really useful for the audience, and not just about 'designing for ourselves'. As a commissioner...
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June 17, 2008

Euro 2008: The websites - France & Italy

Since the Euro2008 draw was made, probably the most keenly anticipated fixture has been tonight's replay of the epic 2006 World Cup Final between France and Italy - but few could have predicted that at the end of tonight there was the certainty that one would be eliminated from the tournament - and the possibility that both could go. I've been conducting a review of the FA websites belonging to the countries taking part in Euro2008, and today I'm...
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June 14, 2008

Castrol's Euro 2008 Performance Index not performing on Google AdWords

As part of their sponsorship of Euro 2008, Castrol have developed a website which produces real-time performance statistics during the matches. Here, for example, are the figures from the Netherlands' obliteration of France last night. It looks like a very nice site - even if they can't spell 'defence' the European way. There is a downloadable Castrol widget for the tournament as well. It is built using Adobe's AIR, so in theory it should be cross-platform. I didn't download...
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May 14, 2008

Newspaper widget review: Facebook Applications

I recently gave a presentation at the Miami IA Summit about Information Architecture and user-centred design ideas for widgets, and I very often blog about newspaper websites on currybetdotnet, so it seemed like an obvious idea to put the two together, and blog about newspaper widgets. In the previous two posts I've looked at the Yahoo! Widgets and Google Gadget platforms. Today I want to turn my attention to the Internet darling of 2007, Facebook. About Facebook Applications The decision...
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May 13, 2008

Newspaper widget review: Google Gadgets

I recently gave a presentation at the Miami IA Summit about Information Architecture and user-centred design ideas for widgets, and I very often blog about newspaper websites on currybetdotnet, so it seemed like an obvious idea to put the two together, and blog about newspaper widgets. In the previous post, I looked at the Yahoo! Widgets platform, and was surprised to find that only one British newspaper seemed to feature in any widgets - The Independent. Today I'm turning my...
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May 12, 2008

Newspaper widget review: Yahoo! Widgets

I recently gave a presentation at the Miami IA Summit about Information Architecture and user-centred design ideas for widgets, and I very often blog about newspaper websites on currybetdotnet, so it seemed like an obviously great idea to put the two together, and blog about newspaper widgets. Well, obvious maybe, but it turned out not to be such a great idea after all. Rather than ending up with a lengthy series of posts looking at all the available widgets and...
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April 20, 2008

IA for tiny stuff: Exploring widgets and gadgets - Part 4

This is part 4 of a 4 part article - 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Another approach that adds more value and entertainment to widgets is including 'Easter Eggs' - hidden bits of content or functionality triggered by specific user actions. The recent marketing campaign for U2's U23D concert movie was a great example of this. Users could download a widget which carried clips of the movie, behind-the-scenes footage, and news about the film leading up to...
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April 19, 2008

IA for tiny stuff: Exploring widgets and gadgets - Part 3

This is part 3 of a 4 part article - 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Now I want to move on and look at a dimension that is often-underused on websites, but can be absolutely crucial for widgets - time. It is fine to have a website or mini-site devoted to coverage of a specific event, and to leave that untouched at the end of the event as an archive of what happened. This particularly applies to...
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April 18, 2008

IA for tiny stuff: Exploring widgets and gadgets - Part 2

This is part 2 of a 4 part article - 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Let us imagine a company, that has just been told by their whizzy new internet consultant that they need to develop their widget strategy if they are to stay relevant to their target audience. The company - Nom Nom - makes small fluffy toys of baby animals, aimed at the pocket money of their target market, 9 to 15 year old girls....
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April 17, 2008

IA for tiny stuff: Exploring widgets and gadgets - Part 1

This is part 1 of a 4 part article - 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 We are all familiar with the basic history of how mankind developed the written word. Initially, to keep any message preserved, or available to be read by a large audience, you basically had to bang it into the side of some rock. This wasn't a very portable format, and it certainly didn't have RSS feeds. Over time humans improved their written communication,...
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February 13, 2008

Saucy Sun snaps in their Facebook apps

Over the last couple of years I've had more cause to be critical of clumsy attempts by newspapers to incorporate advanced web features into their offering than I've had opportunity to praise them. However, I feel I have to grudgingly offer some respect to The Sun for the way they are using MySpace widgets and Facebook apps. They've launched a MY Sun Girl Next Door application on both platforms. "Is your Facebook or MySpace profile lacking some hotty action? Fancy...
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February 1, 2008

Vote Super Furry Animals!

I noticed last week that my favourite Welsh band, Super Furry Animals, were adding an interactive element into their North American tour. They are visiting the US to promote their most recent album, 'Hey Venus!', and are allowing people to vote for the songs they most want to hear included in the set-list. It reminded me of a couple of earlier attempts at doing this kind of interactive set-list. In 1986 Elvis Costello went out on tour with the 'Spectacular...
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January 29, 2008

24/7 TV news websites: Part 14 - Lateral and related navigation I

In the previous post in my ever-lengthier look at the websites of 24/7 TV news channels, I examined some of the types of global navigation that the sites had in common. Today I wanted to start looking at the ways that users are encouraged to move between stories. In general the dominant types of page on a news site are the 'story page', and the 'index page' which carries links through to various 'story pages', usually arranged into a hierarchy...
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January 28, 2008

IA for tiny stuff: Exploring widgets and gadgets at the 2008 IA Summit in Miami

If you've been following my travel plans via Dopplr (and if you aren't, you are very welcome to) you'll have noticed that a few weeks ago I added a trip to Miami in April. With the publication of the conference programme at the weekend, I'm very excited to be able to confirm that I am going to be speaking at the 2008 IA Summit. I will be presenting "IA for tiny stuff: Exploring widgets and gadgets". You can find the...
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January 21, 2008

24/7 TV news websites: Part 9 - Sky News

Two weeks ago, when I started this series of posts looking at the Web 2.0 features of 24/7 news websites, I intended to look at 8 news providers - based on the fact that they are widely available in the English language in Europe. So far I've examined the sites belonging to Al Jazeera, the BBC, CNN, Euronews, France 24, ITN and Russia Today. In this review I want to look at Sky News. One thing I noted about Sky...
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June 21, 2007

British newspaper and blog feeds OPML file listed on Grazr

I spotted the other day that my OPML file of British newspaper news and blog RSS feeds had made its way onto Grazr - 348 British Newspaper and Blog feeds - a service which I hadn't come across before. Grazr is a web application which, as its web 2.0-ish name suggests, allows you to 'graze' through collections of feeds rather than subscribe to them forever. RSS feeds are great, but the subscription model used by aggregators is slow and clumsy....
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September 5, 2006

"Schmap: Zaragoza Photo Inclusion"

I've been playing around with a downloadable travel guide application called Schmap over the last few days. Essentially it brings together a detailed city map, suggested walks, pictures of a city and reviews of the local night life and eateries, into one download which can be accessed offline. A lot of the content is sourced either from Wcities and Flickr. Using people's Creative Commons licensed photographs from Flickr gives the Schmap team access to free content, and also provides them...
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