Widget Crazy - A Huge List of Widget Sites

Love widgets? Can’t get enough? Then check out this collection of widget web sites for finding and/or creating your own widgets for use on your site, blog, social network, or desktop. Did I leave any great ones off? Let me know in the comments!

Search/Directories

• Cleverhippo - widget search engine
• Flickerdna -  flickr widgets
• Goodwidgets - photo widgets for your blog
• SpringWidgets - huge selection of blog widgets
• Snippero - widgets for your web site
• Spinlets - free web site/blog widgets - 2 galleries - Music and General, which features widgets for Twitter, digg, flickr, YouTube, and more
• Widgetoko - blog that tracks daily widget awesomeness
• Widgetbox - widgets for your blog
• Widgipedia - desktop and blog widgets
• YouCams - video cam widgets for your blog
• Yourminis - widgets for your web site/blog or desktop

Build Your Own

• Clearspring - widget platform
• Mashupmania - Build your own mashup widget in a virtual environment without coding
• Showyourself - Show your community & social media memberships
• SproutBuilder - online widget builder

RSS Widgets

• Feedflash - A free online tool to create web widgets, feed readers and place them everywhere on the web.
• Feednames - feednames is an advanced, automatic namecloud widget. Using artificial intelligence techniques based on LingPipe technology, feednames extracts the most relevant words from each article in the feed, and automatically creates a "namecloud" out of them.
• Grazr - RSS widget
• Opod - OPML & RSS widget
• Optimal - OPML widget

Stats Widgets

• Myustats - page rank & more
• Neoworx - cool stats widgets - even one that looks like an iPod

Desktop Widgets

• Amnesty Hypercube - move web widgets to your desktop
• Widgipedia - desktop and blog widgets
• Yourminis - widgets for your web site/blog or desktop
• Yahoo Widgets
• Google Gadgets

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  TumblWeed is an Adobe AIR/Flash app for bloggers who use the Tumblr blog platform. With TumblWeed, you don’t have to open an web browser and go online to blog - just use this desktop application. There isn’t a WYSIWYG blog editor, but you can drag and drop photos and audio files to upload them to your Tumblr blog. You can also view your posts on a mini-dashboard.  The app is in alpha, but looks pretty good. You can download it (and Flash and AIR if you don’t already have them) from here.

Bambuser  is a new service that lets you broadcast live video from your mobile phone onto your website or blog. You can also use a web cam, but that’s not nearly as cool.

To get started with this new, alpha service, do the following:

1. Install the bambuser application on your phone. Download it here or point your mobile browser to http://m.bambuser.com.
2. Start the application and review the configuration options at Options » Settings.
3. Enter your username and password at Options » Settings » Credentials.
4. Start the broadcast by choosing Options » Connect.

The blogger over at bavatuesdays just discovered a little-known feature in Google Docs - a "publish to blog" option. To use this feature, open up your document, click on the "Publish" tab (on far right), and you’ll see an "publish to blog" option. The first time you use this feature, you’ll need to set up your blog info and details (like whether it’s WordPress or Blogger and URL, etc). After the initial configuration, you can just click "publish to blog" and you doc goes live on your blog!

PictoBrowser is a web app that lets you quickly and easily create photo galleries that can be added to your website or blog. To use PictoBrowser, just click the PictoBrowser logo on any PictoBrowser you see or go online to their website, enter your flickr username, choose your set, tag, or group, and the HTML code will be generated which you then post to your site.

How easy is it? I made my first PictoBrowser in literally, 5 seconds. In 10 seconds, I had customized it so it would fit here.

HelloTxt is a website that lets you post to multiple microblogging services at once. The supported services include Twitter, jaiku, Pownce, meemi, tumblr, yappd, and more. If you’re a member of more than one of these services, you know that updating multiple services at once can be time-consuming and usually not even worth your time. Although jaiku will display your Twitter posts for you, many services don’t have any aggregation features. Now with HelloTxt, you can quickly microblog to all the services at once.

Here’s a Blackberry rumor to drool over: supposedly, an touchscreen, iPhone-like Blackberry line is coming in 2008. According to the rumor, the Blackberry 9000 series will be a touch-screen device with a small form factor. Unlike traditional Blackberrys, the 9000 series won’t have the half-screen/half-keyboard look. What it will have, however, is an upgraded multimedia system, which means it should have good mp3 and video capabilities, especially if it’s going to compete with the iPhone. The 9000 series will also be 3G; that would be a killer feature since the iPhone only gets good speed when it’s on wi-fi. And of course, the 9000 series is still a Blackberry, so push email will remain standard. (picture is wishful thinking only)

If you have one or two blogs that you are addicted to, you may find this service useful: SendMeRSS. Unlike an RSS email subscription like service like mine, which emails you a digest of recent blog posts, SendMeRSS will deliver individual posts as they go live in a single email to an email address you provide. The service is not only useful for keeping tabs on your favorite sites, but could also come in handy to receive blog posts on a mobile phone, a computer where the website is blocked, or a computer where you have email but no internet access. However, if you sign up for more than a couple of blogs using this service, your inbox will soon be overrun with blog post emails, so use this service sparingly!

If you haven’t figured out RSS yet, check out this video for a great explanation:

(via Digital Inspiration)

ShareThis is a web service that lets you instantly access all of your profiles, blogs, friends, and contacts for easy sharing of web content. Now, the company has just announced a new version of the popular ShareThis button, ShareThis 2.0. The button, designed for content publishers, lets your site’s visitors easily share your content via social bookmarking websites or by emailing the post to a friend. With ShareThis 2.0, the button has gotten a major overhaul. You can now configure the button type, which social web services you want to include (including Facebook & MySpace), and you can even pick colors that match your website. You can also now share via IM and mobile chat protocols, like SMS. There are new tracking reports so you can see how people are sharing your content. (These will be available after the button has collected a month’s worth of data). However, the biggest news is that the new button supports non-WordPress platforms, so you’ll probably start seeing a lot more of this button soon.

New Technorati CEO, Richard Jalichandra, is already making things right after only one week on the job. To that end, Technorati is making some great changes:

1. Filtering tools are back. Filtering search results by the source blog’s authority is a tool that bloggers wanted & were very upset over when it was removed.
2. Tag search results and keyword search results have been separated once again. As Richard says, “We also know now that we alienated bloggers who tagged their blog posts, say, as being about Facebook (a really nice little company, I might add) by burying them with all blog posts that mention Facebook.”
3. Charts are back - you can see the popularity of a word over time.
4. They had been moving to a new co-location facility. They know they had issues during the move. The move is over and everything is going to be okay now. Promise.
5. They are implementing plans to enhance crawler accuracy & reduce indexing latency.
6. They know they need to get back to what is at their core: blog search.

Looks like we can’t count Technorati out yet.