Happy Holidays, the WidgGeek Way

DURING the holiday season, it's important to remember all the little things that count.

Despite the often harsh critique on widgets this blog has, we're thankful for them. Even though we expect a lot, we're respectful of, and even glad for, their lighter roots.

So in honor of that, here's some of the zaniest, kitchiest, most absurd and fun holiday widgets.

Happy holidays, from WidgetWatch!

1. Leg Lamp: For all the fans of TNT's never-ending loop of the holiday classic.

2. Snow Line: Help Santa collect all the presents so he can distribute them to all the good little boys and girls.

3. Christmas dinner: Collect turkeys and puddings to help prepare a delicious, though certainly not nutritious, holiday feast.

4. Countdown: There are a million of these out there, this is my pick for cheesiest. For your dashboard.

5. Festive Lights: Get your desktop festive. It's not a holiday till your dock sparkles with Christmas spirit.

6. "Waltz of the Flowers" from The Nutcracker. Greet everyone on your blog with the classical Christmas tunes.

7. Christmas music: For all the traditional Christmas tunes. A Google gadget for your iGoogle homepage.

8. Menorah: For our Jewish WidgGeeks. A candle is added each day. (If anyone can find a dreidel widget, I'll be forever grateful...I can't find one anywhere)

9. Kinara: Kwanzaa widget, with a new candle everyday. From Springbox, the same developer as the menorah widget.

10. Dancing Santa: an embedded YouTube video (yep, they're widgets, too!). Too funny, too addicting.



Happy holidays!

Holiday Travel Helper

IT will cost me nearly $100 to visit my parents and sister over Thanksgiving.

Not that you can put a price on family, love, blah blah blah.

But, for those of us quite short on cash and high on miles to drive this holiday season, here's a handy (and well-done) gas pricer being promoted by Apple right now. You tell the widget your zip code, and the widget hooks up with Google Maps to find you the best prices on the way. Nothing is more frustrating than gassing up to the tune of $3.70 per gallon only to see a sign advertising $3.60 ten miles later. You can also choose to look only for a specific grade or all grades (in the picture, I was search for all grades...I'm just in a small town where most gas stations don't bother to offer more than regular.)

Though it seems to be a simple, low-importance widget, the way it pulls information and provides customized details from multiple, unrelated sites without forcing you to get online, find gas stations and then check their prices on each company's Web site makes it a strong widget.

Safe and happy travels!

Widgets and the Brand of You

FACEBOOK, MySpace, OpenSocial, Twitter, Jaiku, Xanga, Flickr, Friendster, LiveJournal ...Social networks have made our personalities, our private lives, a new brand. Updating your brand can rival a full-time job.

Widgets help manage your personal brand online. If you run a blog, you can put a blidget on each of your other sites, but that only links your social profiles to your blog, not instantly updates each individually.

Zude has acquired the reputation of being the Switzerland of the social networking sites by the blogosphere for its ability to compile, view and link all of your other profiles, blogs and personalities into your one Zude profile. But it's new widget reverses the process and allows you to update your status in ONE place, and instantly be updated everywhere, from Facebook to Flickr.

Whether being able to constantly update the entire world (or at least your gigantic network of e-"friends") of your constant location changes and mood swings is a good thing we'll leave to debate somewhere else. For better or worse, widgets are letting us broadcast ourselves in cyberspace in a more instantaneous way than ever before.

This widget is unusual because it's function reverse of what other brilliant, useful widgets are. Most widgets pull information from various sources, repackage it and pile it into one widgety-delicious package. The Zude widget takes one source and distributes it to multiple sites.

If a widget can do all that for measely you and I, imagine what it could do for corporations with a lot more time and money to devote (Zude offers options to create family, group and business profiles) With a new ease of updating, those who sell can increase their Web presence, personalize how they sell themselves to each site or market, all while keeping the ease-of-maintenance.

But until then, Zude must be satisfied with selling you to the masses.

Not-for-work Widget of the Day

Light Bulb Jokes

With over 1,000 light bulb jokes, you can offend every gender, sexuality, race and creed in your office! (see below...)

Far and away, funny4myspace has consistently had the most shocking/useless/borderline offensive widgets out there. I would have expected more out of the accessories for the social network that gave us Tila Tequila. Way to go.

You're a Consumer Whore...and How!

JUST in time for the holiday season, here's WidgetWatch's list of widgets that save you a few bucks--and time clipping.

1. salestastic.com coupon widget: New widget that allows you to choose from a list of national chains to find out what their sales are. Works well across different browsers. Annoyingly, however, you can't copy the code OR download the widget to your dashboard, only check it online (and it's one of the ugliest widget's I've seen. Ever.)

2. Couponcabin.com: The original multi-store coupon widget. Customizable and printable, with over 900 stores.

3. MamaGets: This Yahoo! Widgets lets you type in what you're in search of, and this widget gives you a couple comparisons.

I had some trouble with the embedding code for MamaGets and Couponcabin, so use the links to download 'em to your dashboard.

Rock the Vote

IT may have taken a little voter fraud, but I finally have the NBA All Star voting widget.

Apparently, you have to vote to get the code for the widget. I know absolutely nothing about pro basketball (I go to Syracuse, it's all about NCAA!), so ten lucky players just got my vote because their names all started with my favorite letter.

Voting for the NBA All-star team began last Thursday at NBA.com, stadiums, via good ol' snail mail, and, for the first time, via widgets available at NBA.com.

The number of votes cast for the teams increased to over 69 million votes last year, a 17% increase. The 2004 Presidential election saw a 16% increase from 2004 (though the number of votes was nearly double the number of NBA All-star ballots), according to numbers from the FEC.

Come January, it will interesting to see if the widget makes a difference in voting numbers, and even more interesting if the NBA can offer a break-down of the demographics. Perhaps the widget is the new voting booth--perhaps it takes this ultimate convenience (laziness) to get the youth vote out.

Widget as enabler...it's an interesting proposition. Would more people vote for political elections, from president to your town's zoning board, if they could do it through their neighbor's MySpace instead of schlupping over to the polling station?

Even if the numbers went up though, I'd worry they'd be random votes--votes that came in simply because it was easy to vote, without any research or care. But in a one-click world, maybe we just need the simplicity.

WidgeQuickies

JARED Novack's post brought up some great points about news widgets. While I agree that there is definitely still a void that needs to be filled, I'd also like to give ya'll some widgets that are already doing this.

Novack mentioned slate.com's Election Scorecard, which definitely is one of the best election widgets out there. Other notables include:

1. The Washington Post's Election Collection, which allows users to choose one candidate and follows their travels and money-making. It still has the links to the traditional narrative stories, but piles all the info in one place.




2. Fundraising tracker, from non-partisan maplight.org. Choose which candidates you want to track.



3. Polling Report: Aggregate of all the recent polls on politics, from which candidate is ahead to Pres. Bush's approval rating.