Having mentioned the great Yahoo charity badge widgets the other day, I mentioned that it would be great if we could have the same in the UK. Well, no sooner asked than already happened: JustGiving and Bmycharity are doing just that; indeed JustGiving already has. How do I know? Steve Bridger’s very interesting list of The trends that will drive charities in 2007! told me…and he (like others) is predicting 2007 to be the year of the widget.
So, I thought I’d get involved and am trying out some of the Typepad widgets on the blog. Let me know if the new Blogbar search is good….and check out the Universal Giving widget further down the page on the right. [UPDATE: have removed Universal Giving: seemed slow to load; have added a poll instead] I’m also really interested in the ChipIn widget with which you can map where donations are coming from….but I’m unclear whether you can collect Gift Aid automatically like the charity ones as yet. Great tools, though: will definitely be seeking to use some of these in the SSE portfolio of sites as we continue to redevelop, as well as letting all our current students and Fellows know about them.
One other good link for this is Dion Hinchcliffe’s Best Web 2.0 software of 2006 post. Excellent round-up of sites I know and use, and new ones. Depending on your work, there will be something of use here.
[As an aside, I had a full-on web 2.0 experience yesterday. I use Pandora to listen to music, but then found this site of other people’s Pandora stations, via Dion’s list. So I was listening to one of those, and heard a cool song by someone called Glen Hansard who I then looked up on Wikipedia and listened to on MySpace. So then I searched for the album on e-music, bought it, downloaded it and played it on the trusty shuffle on the tube home. Genius.
UPDATE: have added Pandora widget at bottom of right-hand column]
Aside from the fundraising campaign, I did a month exploration of widgets on my blog -you can read all my posts on widgets here – not just charity badges
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/widgets/index.html
Thanks for the link to http://pandorastations.crispynews.com. I’m the site creator. I’m glad you found the site useful.
Tim
Pandora profile: http://www.pandora.com/people/pandorastations
Thanks Tim: listening to some new music now.
And thanks Beth: as ever, you’ve already covered the subject in depth! Particularly liked how you can start to choose from the many widgets available:
“-Does it help you generate traffic?
-Does it add value to your blog content or for your readers?
-Does have the ability to encourage more conversation or comments?
-How much does it contributes to slow loading?”
The latter is particularly an issue, I think…I’ve noticed this a little, so I’m going to keep an eye on anything Flash-heavy.
Cheers.