Brad Feld

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Widgets, Stats, and Blogroll Crawling

Feb 28, 2007
Category Investments

I owe David Cohen a cross-post on widgets in our Big or Bullshit series.  This isn’t it – I’ll get to it.  But – my hint is that while they are big, it’s more bullshit than big (think application packaging – we’ll talk more later.)

In the meantime, a number of my companies continue to crank out stuff in and around the world of widgets.  FeedBurner just integrated their Headline Animator widget into their publisher engagement metrics (stats for us nerds.)  Lijit just started crawling blogrolls while Bijan simultaneously noticed that the Lijit Wijit (er “widget”) just started reporting some interesting stats on what people were searching on his blog.  Todd Vernon reminds us how important measuring everything is and put up a screenshot of a huge Raindance milestone from Monday when Raindance crossed the 5 million / day of audioconferencing minutes (I remember how excited we were when this metric crossed 100,000 / day.  Finally, Eric Lunt of FeedBurner spent some time having fun with User-Agents, once again showing how hard it actually can be to accurately measure stuff.

Widgets are big, but they are also bullshit.  Coincidentally I just saw a GigaOm article titled Widgets Don’t Age WellMore coming soon.