Widget distribution networks are becoming a popular vehicle for major content distributors to get their content in context in weblogs, personal Web pages, portals and other content outlets. The New York Times joins the list of self-service widget distributors today with the beta launch of its Times Widgets feature. Using a simple point-and-click online form anyone can select NYT headlines from any of their more than 10,000 topical RSS feeds and get code that you can insert into your favorite publishing software or enjoy a one-click insert into iGoogle, Blogger, Vox or Netvibes. The net result is a display of recent headlines from one or more feeds, each with its own tabbed display. The popular Gigya widget distribution service provides the widget plumbing for Times Widgets, which promises that more platforms can be added as instant-add options soon enough.

It's a great positioning for the NYT's RSS feed content, which is popular enough with RSS enthusiasts but not necessarily getting the referral links out to the pages of news enthusiasts as quickly as news organizations would like. The problem is a familiar one: even with a very simple feed like RSS, only a small percentage of people are willing to do the minor heavy lifting to put an RSS feed into a useful place. Feeds are great, but the technologies to get them into useful places easily have been lagging. Widgets make it easy to manage feeds as part of a published page, ensuring not just the exposure of content but the ability to do more things with a widget payload over time.

It will also make it easier for the NYT to get come data as to which people using widgets are worth approaching to be advertising partners as well: there's nothing to say that money-making content cannnot be in those widget payloads, after all. Moves like the Times Widgets beta are examples of how publishers can use widget distribution technologies to open doors both to referral links and to advertising partners that can add value to their brands in a far more cost-effective way than traditional business development efforts. Not a bad deal for just a little bit of development effort. Kudos, folks, the building may have to go but with efforts like this there are good reasons to hope that mainstream news content can find its most valuable contexts more efficiently than ever.

Labels: embedding, gigya, New York Times, News, widgets

When first I checked out Mochila a couple of years ago they were booting up their business plan around self-service licensing for premium content - largely a storefront approach for licensing individual premium articles and other content that could be used in a Web site. Lots has changed since then with Mochila. While integrating individual items of content from premium sources is still a key component of their solution today the Mochila platform is far more about delivering streams of premium syndicated content via widgets, with licensing pushed to the background as terms and conditions rather than a marketing theme.

In the time that it took Mochila to hammer out this positioning many services have sprung up to deliver contextual ad and content widgets. From Inform to Sphere to Voxant and even traditional B2B licensors such as Alacra there is a broadening mix of players trying to get valuable content in context. Like some of these plays Mochila also offers contextual ad services that can benefit both the syndicators and the licensors, which gives some flexibility in monetization. Mochila also upped the breadth of content being syndicated, including photos and videos in the mix as well. Now Mochila has announced a slideshow player that makes it easy for sites to embed photo slide shows in their sites - a feature already popular for those wanting mashups of celebrity photo-ops.

The bigger picture, though, is that content syndication is becoming far more self-service for a far wider array of publishers, with tools like Mochila enabling content brands to travel further, wider and in a more integrated fashion more automatically than ever before. Syndication used to be more about going into the back end of content services, but in today's federated content environments content finds itself increasingly aggregated on the front end of publishing platforms, with database integration either bypassed altogether or an afterthought at best. In essence the only database that really seems to matter to many online publishers is the index in search engines trying to help people find their sites - and the rich array of content than can be embedded via services such as Mochila.

Labels: content in context, mochila, syndication, weblogs, widgets

The announcement of Factiva's deployment of improved integration capabilities via browser-based Web applications is being heralded as a major leveraging of Web 2.0 technologies to improve Factiva content delivery. The new tools allow Factiva SalesWorks content to be integrated into enterprise portal applications via user-embeddable widgets into Web 2.0 platforms using technologies that eliminate having to deal with feeds into back-end server applications. This is an important step forward into allowing both enterprise users and development teams to use SalesWorks content where it matters most to them, without having to rely on expensive and time-consuming custom integration efforts. SalesWorks offers a good range of content, but as enterprises turn to a wide range of CRM applications, Wikis and other platforms as their "go-to" business information platforms services such as Factiva have to move quickly and effectively to make their content a part of those user-centric environments.

While these new integration capabilities are hardly revolutionary by overall industry standards they do represent an important step forward by a major enterprise content aggregator to move further away from its own platform to offer customers the ability to put their content where they will find it to be most useful. Much of the focus on enterprise workflow integration by aggregators has been on creating comprehensive tools to solve specific information retrieval problems. By moving to browser-based content embedding technologies aggregators can move more quickly to bring their content to users via the applications that matter in their workflows already on a day-to-day basis.

This is a sword that cuts both ways, of course: in ceding the complete workflow to other applications integrators trade off more complete integration for more quick market penetration. As penetration is the key to both retaining subscription bases and expanding opportunities for add-on marketing efforts it pays to go the embeddable route - a picture that will become more clear to more aggregators in time. Aggregation is no longer such a rarefied game - both Factiva and other content aggregators will face increasing competition from technology-oriented companies that know how to provide value-add functionality on top of many different types of business information content sets. It's a race of sorts to see how providers of licensed content sets can switch to a strategy that will get embedded in desktops securely before these other providers gain the upper hand. In the meantime Factiva has made a strong move to claim their place in the new widget-oriented enterprise desktop as quickly as possible.

Labels: aggregation, Business Information, Dow Jones, embedding, Factiva, widgets