clearspring - the widget network.

One of my vivid memories from college is walking into the student union to see fliers everywhere. Groups would try to get your attention with whatever event they wanted you to attend. Some of the most popular fliers were when they showed cool documentary films on campus.

These days students don’t spend as much time in the student union. Time is being spent on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, where users are sharing their lives with their friends and family.

Well Clearspring’s Chairman of the Board Ted Leonsis and Board member Steve Case have seen this trend and recently launched SnagFilms. It’s an online destination for watching documentary films. It gives documentary filmmakers, who probably don’t have the money for major theater distribution, access and distribution to a world audience via the Web.

They’ve launched with a lot great content such as State of the Union, Paper Clips, and Super Size Me.

Viewers can then show support for the movie by taking the corresponding widget and distributing it to all of their friends via social networks and blogs by using our Launchpad platform.

For example, here’s the widget for Super Size Me:

After only six months, Clearspring’s Widget Promotion Channel (WPC) has landed in comScore’s Media Metrix Top 50 Ad Focus Ranking for June 2008. According to comScore, WPC has achieved 36,495,000 views and has a reach of 19% of the Internet.

Many congrats to our Media Services team and advertising product team for making this product such a success… Stay tuned. We’ve been working hard to make this product even better.

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can jump start the distribution of your widget using our Widget Promotion Channel or if you’d be interested in monetizing your Web site by joining our network of content affiliates, fill in your information on our contact page and check “Advertising with Clearspring.”

Last Thursday was the Washington DC Twin Tech Party at the U Street club Local 16. Hundreds of local executives, designers, developers, sales people, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts from local companies came to celebrate their common interest in continuing to make the Washington DC metro area a hub of activity for the Web and technology industries.

We had a nice posse of Clearpsring folks there. We all met a ton of great people. Due to the nature of the event, there was a bigger cross section of folks at this then the usual DC tech event. We also handed out A LOT of stickers, which people proudly wore. If you’d like some stickers, see my previous note.

The whole event, was inspired from a blog post written by Zach Goldfarb for the Washington Post. He noticed from two simultaneous events happening on the same day that there were two tech communities in the Washington DC area. My good friend and CEO of iStrategyLabs Peter Corbett took the initiative and decided to throw a joint party that would unite the two communities.

The event got even more exciting when Business Week and best selling author of “Once Your Lucky. Twice Your Good” Sarah Lacy decided to come to Washington DC as part of her user-generated book tour. She came to the event and got the opportunity meet the local tech scene, as well as sell and sign books.

Sarah is someone that’s seen the inside and outside of Silicon Valley. She was able to impart a lot of valuable advice to us about how we can grow the local community for it to become even more of an exciting place to work and grow a business.

Having Central Command here in the Washington DC area is definitely a source of pride for us here at Clearspring. We want to do our best to contribute and support this community. We hope there will be many more parties like this in the future.

Kudos to Peter for putting on such a great event and thanks to Sarah for coming out.

(Photos taken by and used with permission of Kenneth Yeung)

So… what does green tea and our Media Services Team have in common? Well, we have lots of both in the office this week.

At Clearspring, we firmly believe in hydration and caffeination, as well as having plenty of snacks in the office. On a regular basis, we make a run to the local warehouse store and pick up a variety of snacks and drinks, especially green tea. (See the photo above.) A couple of our product managers have a thing for green tea. *cough*

Not having to worry about going to find the closest soda machine, coffee place, or convenience store, whenever I get a craving, makes our work lives infinitely more productive.

This week we had our entire Media Services team from all over the country in at Clearspring Central Command in beautiful McLean, Virginia for their quarterly meeting. In preparation, our game room got converted into a large conference so that we could accommodate all of the team members (and the slip ‘n slide… just kidding).

Led by our Senior Vice President of Media Services Peggy Fry, this is a great opportunity for them to spend time together, strategize, and plan for the upcoming quarter.

Did I mention that these guys like to party together? Our Vice President of Sales Steve Touhill threw a killer barbecue last night for the entire team.

PS - Bonus points if you can identify the photo of your favorite Clearspring blogger.

Seems like more and more I’ll go to a Web site and I’ll just want to take a piece of it with me to my start page. Well, the company RCRD LBL has made that easy.

RCRD LBL pronounced “record label” is…

an online record label releasing exclusive and completely free music from emerging and established artists. In addition to our in-house label, the RCRD LBL network includes a curated roster of independent record labels offering free MP3 downloads and multimedia content in blog format.

For a new band, this is a sweet way of getting your music out into the hands of the people that want to listen.

In a recent release of their site, they turned popular components of their Web site into widgets. On the home page, there are Flash widgets with a list of Fans, Tour Dates, and a list of their Most Popular music.

They did an amazing job of implementing Launchpad Advanced. When you click “Grab This”, you get their own customized share menu with the options for where you want the widget to be shared.

Here’s a screenshot of the RCRD LBL Radio Widget:

Have you built something cool with Launchpad Advanced? Share it with us. Post the URL in the comments or e-mail me at - justin@clearspring.com

Starting in 1965, Washingtonian magazine has been a staple of covering what’s hot in the Washington DC area. One thing the magazine is known for is its editorial lists that pick who or what locally is at the top of their fields.

Well, we’re really psyched and totally flattered that in July’s Best of Washington edition Clearspring is listed as a “Hot Stock.”

Having Clearspring Central Command here in the Washington DC area has been great for us and also a source of pride. We’ve been able to attract some of the top creative, engineering, and management talent from both inside and outside of the Beltway. Being our nation’s capitol, Washington DC just has a lot to offer. For example, where else could you have seen a better fireworks show this last Fourth of July weekend?

We really think the fun has just begun. The future is coming and we’re going to play a major role. If you wanna help shape the future and join the Clearspring team, check out our careers page our e-mail our Director of Recruiting Ian Jones at jobs@clearspring.com

Come help us keep this momentum going. We want the Washingtonian to have no choice but name Clearspring a “Hot Stock” again in 2009.

Friday, I won’t be standing in line to get the new iPhone 3G. I’m going to be on the road again.

I’ll be headed to the great Northwest… Seattle, Washington. Saturday is SocialMediaCamp. It’s a BarCamp-style event focused on the use and development of social media as well as “community-based” marketing. One of the organizers is my friend and master community marketer Erica O’Grady. I’d love to get a discussion going about how widgets are a necessary part of any social media strategy.

Come Saturday evening it will be time to party. The Web 2.0 and social networking blog Mashable is hosting a US Summer Tour and Saturday night is their stop in Seattle. I’m confident I’ll be there late into the evening. Just look for the guy in the Clearspring t-shirt or covered in Clearspring stickers.

On July 21st, I’ll be heading out early to San Francisco for a couple days of meeting with folks and then the Facebook’s developer conference F8 ‘08 on July 23rd.

I’ve been out there so much that San Fran is quickly becoming one of my homes away from home and with the F8 conference I’m extra excited about this trip. Rumors are already starting to spread about what’ll be announced.

If you’ll be in Seattle or San Francisco during either of these times that I’ll be there, please please please let me know. My e-mail address is justin@clearspring.com. I’d love to meetup and grab a coffee or a pint.

Also… follow both Clearspring and me on Twitter. This is a good way to get in touch and keep track of my/the company’s adventures, especially as I travel to different developer events and conferences around the country.

This summer at Clearspring we’ve been pretty heads down busy working on some REALLY cool things. Regardless, we’ve been taking lots of opportunities to have some fun.

Over the last couple days, our incredibly talented Creative Director Jeff Wong has been working to beautify the office. Throughout his time at Clearspring, he’s been taking a photographic history of the company, which is available at our Flickr account.

Well… he’s printed out some of the best photos and hung them in our office, along with some of the logos of our partners.

Here at Command Central in beautiful McLean, Virginia (just outside of Washington DC), we’ve been having some amazing weather. So… more and more we’ve been trying to take some time and eat at the patio tables outside. This has also been helpful because as we’ve grown as a company a lot of the tables we had used for lunch are now people’s desks.

A couple days ago, our real boss at Clearspring, Office Manager Carol, had cake ordered to celebrate the dozen or so birthdays that happened in June/July. We even opened up a conference call line so that all of our satellite offices could join in singing “Happy Birthday”.

If you’d like to join the team and be part of this fun, check out our jobs page or drop a line to our Director of Recruiting Ian Jones at jobs@clearspring.com.

By the way, I don’t mention this enough. You can follow Clearspring on Twitter at - http://twitter.com/clearspring

Seems like every time I go to a conference every company is handing out some type of cool swag. I figured it was about time that here at Clearspring we got some cool stuff we could hand out too.

We decided to start out with something simple. We have white Clearspring stickers with our logo on them.

Would you like a couple?

We’re going to do this the old fashioned way. If you’d like some stickers, send a self addressed stamped envelope to the address below and we’ll send you some stickers back.

Justin Thorp
Clearspring Technologies
8000 Westpark Dr.
Suite 625
McLean, VA 22102

If you also wanna throw in the envelope that you’re sending us, something like a photo or a post card, we’ll send you a small surprise back in addition to the stickers. We look forward to hearing from you.

By the way, make sure that you follow Clearspring on Twitter. That way you’ll know all the events and conferences where you can get stickers and other swag in person. The URL is - http://twitter.com/clearspring

One thing that we have been discussing a lot internally is how we can help move the community that uses our products and evolve into a community that knows and helps each other grow. We’ve done a lot of brainstorming and have come up with some solid ideas.

An idea that we’ve recently launched is restructuring our community forum.

We spent some time looking at the existing content and rearranged things accordingly. I hope this will assist in getting people the help they need as quickly and easily as possible.

Our first section covers things like company announcements, system status updates, and general feedback. The first two forums will be controlled and posted to only by us. In the feedback forum, we always welcome and encourage your thoughts.

The next section is to both introduce yourself to your fellow Clearspring users as well as to the different user groups that may be in your geographic area. We all really want to get to you know you personally and I hope you all feel the same way about us and each other. We see this forum as a great venue for that.

The “Developing Your Widget” section is similar to the old Help & Support forum. Now it has been broken down by product name. This will make it easier for us to make sure that we can get you the support you need as fast as possible. This section will be manned by the truly amazing John Nelson. As many of you have gotten to know him personally, you’ve witnessed that he is a tireless supporter of the Clearspring community and is here to help you with whatever technical problems you may have.

In the “Distributing Your Widget” section, we’d love to start some discussion about how to get your widget seen. When I’m out talking with folks, this is something that people ask about a lot. They want best practices, which we happily share. In here we’d love to hear your thoughts about what works and what doesn’t.

Lastly, the “Open Forum” section gives you a venue to discuss what makes a great widget as well as let people know whether or not you need a widget developer or that you are one willing to be hired.

I hope you all find the new forum restructuring useful. If you have any questions about it, don’t hesitate to drop me a line - justin@clearspring.com