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Everybody loves widgets - they’re everywhere. They’re on “Ajax homepages”, like Netvibes, Google, Live.com, on my OSX Dashboard and on the new Windows Vista Sidebar - everywhere, really. Now, they’re starting to invade our blogs too, and the question is: when is it going to stop?

Content first, please

Widgets give you one thing and one thing only (at least so far): little bits of useful information. Now, useful information is exactly that, useful, but usually (most of the time, I hope) not as important as content. That’s why the OSX Dashboard hides widgets away so you only see them when you need them. Let’s put it this way: what’s really important to your readers? Is it what you write on your blog, or is it the last tracks you’ve heard on Last.fm, or maybe the time in San Francisco in a beautiful stylized watch, or webcam widgets showing 5th avenue (everybody loves those) or, let’s go all the way with this, what about a streaming music player? - I bet everyone would love that. The fact is, nobody really cares about anything but your content - and truth be told, thats good: it means you write, and people read. So what is the point of having weblogs look like christmas trees if that only annoys the hell out of people, makes page loading a pain in the butt, and confuses the eyes to a point where they scream at the brain: “Find the feed URL and lets get out of here, now!”.

Well, Christmas is coming, right?

The “blog as christmas tree” is the metaphor I came up with for the widgetification of weblogs and websites. People cram everything they can into layouts, like they were decorating a christmas tree. There is one very important thought here, though: in a christmas tree, the focus is the tree, whereas on your blog, the focus is your content, not your recent searches, your google ads, your shopping list or your 50 album recommendations. Remember when people visit blogs like this, their brain screams “get out, just get out now!”.

OPML is maturing and needs an identity. Help spread the word about OPMLIcons.com and join the conversation. … In October 2005, Dave Winer put out a community request for a beautiful OPML icon. While several options were presented none have gained traction. During our quest for an icon during an OPML related project we realized we needed to develop our own. You are free to take this icon and spread it around the community, use it for your own projects, or create derivatives. The only thing we request is that you release your creation under the same license to the community. View the original Dave Winer post: http://www.opml.org/2005/10/30#a111 View Chris Pirillo’s post from Gnomedex: http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/06/30/opml-icon/

Source: OPML Icon Project I posted about this a while ago and now Ken Rossi (of Civil Netizen fame among other things) has commented on that post to let me know that the OPMLIcons.com site is now live. Go and join in the conversation :D

Back at the MIX06 conference in Las Vegas, I demonstrated synchronization live and on-stage between Vista, IE7, and the NewsGator platform (including FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and an early build of our windows mobile product). Today, I’m proud to be able to point you to the first public beta of NewsGator Desktop Sync. This will fully synchronize your NewsGator subscriptions (including our clients such as FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, etc, when running in sync mode) with Vista and/or IE7 and their included RSS platforms. As I’ve said before, Vista and IE7 are going to have a big impact on syndication as we know it…and as promised, NewsGator is extending that experience beyond the desktop. If you’re running IE7 RC1 or later, or Windows Vista RC1 or later, download it and give it a try!

Source: NewsGator Desktop Sync for IE7 and Vista Interesting times ahead for RSS/feed reading, especially for Vista users.

Xanga, the popular social networking site, has been ordered to pay a $1 million civil penalty for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, in a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. The penalty is the largest ever assessed by the FTC for a COPPA violation. The charge seems pretty straightforward. Xanga stated that under 13s couldn’t join, but then provided accounts to those who indicated that they were under 13 on the sign-up form (ie. the user’s birth date made them a child). In Xanga’s defense, however, they did require all users to tick a box verifying that they were over 13. Xanga’s mistake was that they didn’t check the birth date - a user whose birth date suggested they were a child would still be given an account if they ticked the box. Over the last five years, Xanga has created 1.7 million accounts for users who entered an age of less than 13. As mentioned previously on Mashable, Xanga serves some of the youngest social networking users, and has some very strong privacy features in place. The company employs a Chief Safety Officer and provides online safety information for users. In fact, one of the reasons we rarely hear about Xanga is because it’s such a closed community. However, this is a strong reminder that social networks have to be extremely careful when it comes to dealing with underage signups. Update: Xanga’s CEO John Hiler has responded with a statement: “Xanga has long been committed to making its site safer for its members. When these issues came to our attention, we instituted a stronger, more comprehensive safety and compliance program.” MSNBC is also reporting on the story.

The Xanga Signup Form

Users of Internet Explorer and the excellent Windows Live Toolbar have a Blog It button. By default it goes to the Spaced editor but once Windows Live Writer is installed you can set if to use that instead. With Windows Live Toolbar being an Internet Explorer only addon Firefox users which stumble upon a bloggable page need to manually kickstart their Windows Live Writer, copy & paste title, copy & paste a quote and finally copy & paste the URL. No more! The Blog It with Windows Live Writer Firefox extension adds the same ability to the right-click menu of Firefox. You can also add a button to one of your toolbars if you wish (see left). Hitting the Blog It button with or without text selected will first pop up a destination screen where you can select which blog to post to. It then starts WIndows Live Writer with the right blog selected and creates the draft of a new post.

Source: Blog It with WLW Firefox Extension/Addon - Windows Live Writer Plugins A great start, although it doesn’t seem to include images, which the Blog It button on the Windows Live Toolbar does. For that matter a copy and paste manages to keep the images, too.