Pages

▼

09 April 2007

Two New Widgets

I added examples of Blogger.com's latest widgets to the sidebar: Chess Videos and Chess News. Both are based on Google services -- YouTube and Google News, respecutively -- as are Blogger / Blogspot.com. I find it ironic that the European Union has been persecuting Microsoft for years and just recently opened an investigation into Apple's iTunes, while the Google juggernaut marches on unimpeded by Eurocrats. I've often noticed that, with only a few notable exceptions, technological trends in the U.S.A. take about two years to reach Europe, by which time it's too late to compete with them.

I'll leave the new widgets at the top of the sidebar for the next few days until the novelty wears off. Clicking on a video opens a viewer in the area normally used for blog posts. I'm interested to see how often the video choices will change. For the last month and a half I've been running an occasional YouTube search on 'chess'. It always presents the same choices at the top of the list, just as a web search would do. The news search, based on recent news items, is naturally more dynamic.

***

12 April: Neither widget is particularly interesting. I removed the video widget and moved the news widget to the bottom of the column.

at

2 comments:

  1. Ryan10 April, 2007 20:41

    Hi Mark,

    I've added these features to my blog too and I was also wondering whether the video choices would change much.

    I think you're right that we probably won't see much change to the video list (I've selected the search expressions chess, garry kasparov, polgar, Vladimir Kramnik, Veselin Topalov and Viktor Korchnoi).

    It seems to flick between these searches every so often, but the videos don't change much.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mark Weeks11 April, 2007 17:51

    'we probably won't see much change to the video list'

    Yes, after two days the choices haven't changed. Not too impressive, is it? Even if we had the option to search on videos added most recently, I'm not sure it would be an improvement. A lot of junk shows up there. A search on 'What's hot?' -- videos enjoying a momentaey surge of popularity -- would be the most interesting. - Mark

    ReplyDelete