Widgety Goodness 2007 - Europe’s first Widget Conference

Posted by: Paul Walsh

Google, plus top agencies to speak on commercial development and opportunities as the Web becomes widgetised.

How to win a ticket

The first 2 people to write “Thanks for our free ticket BIMA http://blog.bima.co.uk” on the Facebook event wall gets a ticket. Visit the Widgety Goodness Facebook wall now.

I’m looking forward to this event as it involves a trip to Brighton where I’ll get to meet lots of cool people, some of whom I’m already connected with on Twitter. There’s a lot of creativity coming out of that town. What’s interesting is that there are lots of standards gurus, demonstrating that creativity and standards can live under the same roof.

On 6th December 2007 Brighton will be host to the first ever European Widget Conference. Featuring speakers from major agencies, social networks, widget platforms and media groups, the one day conference will look at the widgetization of content for social networks and its implications for marketers.

Big brands are recognising the huge potential of widgets to deliver their marketing messages and allow consumers to customise their own Web experience. Widgety Goodness will aim to answer some of the key questions about widgets and help marketing professionals in brand, media and advertising understand how to harness one of the main online developments of the last year. With the explosive growth of social networking, blogging and personal start pages in 2007 set to continue, understanding widgets is now crucial.

There are a range of speakers from around the world to provide insight into widget creation, delivery, analytics and SEO. Key players such as Google’s Business Product Manager, Christian Oestlien, are expected to speak along with blogger extraordinaire Russell Davies. The conference will focus on widget tools and platforms, and commercial applications with real world case studies and panel discussion regarding social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.

Christian Oestlien, from Google, sees its AdSense network as more than a place to run text-link advertising. With relationships with tens of thousands of small Web publishers, Google sees an opportunity for AdSense to become a new version of the portal, able to re-aggregate audiences whose attentions are fragmented across many online destinations.

We think it addresses this whole notion of audience fragmentation that’s happening on the Web,” said Oestlien. “A lot of our video partners are living in a world where their audience is spread out across thousands of Web sites.

In order to step beyond the confines of the conference itself and to facilitate the ‘conference as social network’, every delegate will get access to a unique moderated conference social network, Backnetwork, in order to make connections, share information and discuss ideas as things happen in this fast-moving space.

Commenting on the conference, Widgety Goodness organiser and founder of Snipperoo Ivan Pope said

Widgetization and fragmentation raise issues that go to the heart of brand control, but offers an incredibly powerful tool to those who can work with rather than against the process. Startups such as RockYou are now seeing hundreds of millions of widget views per week right across the spectrum from blogs to MySpace to personal start pages such as iGoogle. The entry of Google itself into the space with the Google Gadget Ads product promises the opening up of managed channels into the social networks.

Successful widgets are viral in nature and are voluntarily taken and embedded in the host Web site. Widgetization means the breaking up of monolithic content into small packages that find their own destinations. It puts control into the hands of consumers with decisions about what content sits where becoming driven by the intelligence of the end user, not by a remote editor.

11 Reasons Why Widgety Goodness is going to be a Key Event for 2007

I’ll be there in support of the event with my BIMA hat on. Do you need any more reasons
Widgets are the must have for all Web applications
Widgets can go places that other things can’t
The Web is fragmenting
Widgets put power back in the hands of the Users (as in User Generated Content)
Widgety Goodness brings together two industries for the first time
Every social network will have a ‘platform’ for widgets by the end of 2008
Google has entered the space big time, to be followed by everyone else
Several billion widgets are served every day
Revenue is following distribution into the widgetsphere
Many new widget applications will launch in 2008