This is a blog about Clearspring, it's development and syndication platform, and the user community around it. It is written by some folks who work there.
If your office is anything like ours, the lunch table and water cooler conversations have been dominated by the election for President of the United States, where we have the Republican Senator from Arizona John McCain running against the Democratic Senator from Illinois Barack Obama.
Throughout the campaign, there has been a lot of talk about what the candidates believe in and what makes them different.
We recently found something that they both have in common. Both John McCain and Barack Obama use Clearspring’s Launchpad as the widget platform to syndicate the widgets for their Presidential campaigns. (The widgets are to the right and below.)
John McCain and Barack Obama, if you’re listening, soon the world will know which one of you will be the next President of the United States. Regardless, we’d love to help you guys make the great content at WhiteHouse.gov shareable to the world using Launchpad and AddThis. Feel free to drop me a line at – justin@clearspring.com
Our friend iStrategyLabs CEO Peter Corbett has recently launched with the District of Columbia Apps for Democracy. It’s a challenge to developers and agencies from around the country to take the public data produced by the District of Columbia (DC) government and create interesting applications and visualizations that will help make lives easier.
This is a great opportunity to innovate and find new interesting uses for this otherwise not that exciting data. Plus, At the end of the contest, 60 prizes will be handed out ranging from $100 to $2000 for a total of $20,000. Oh and it’s not limited to people in the DC area.
So if you have sometime this weekend, bang out a quick app or widget. You could potentially make some cash and help make people’s lives easier.
I’d love to see someone make some Clearspring widgets for the contest. If you make something, send it my way and I’ll try and highlight it on the blog. My e-mail address is – justin@clearspring.com
Over the last few years, it’s been a blast to watch the rise of and get to know Gary Vaynerchuk. He’s Director of Operations at Wine Library a New Jersey-based wine shop that decided to go online. As a way to reach new audiences, he decided to start the online video show Wine Library TV, which turned him and the Wine Library into a viral sensations and dominate brands.
In a recent video on his personal site (embedded above), conveys the same belief that we have, that the existence of online communities has amplified the ability for word-of-mouth and sharing to take place between people.
Here at Clearspring, our goal is to make it as easy a possible for that word-of-mouth marketing and sharing to take place on the Web. All of these different online communities and destinations are very fragmented, utilizing different standards, and processes. At Clearspring, we help to bridge the gap. We make it so that a publisher can make their content shareable to all these places, regardless.
Wanna make your content shareable? Drop me a line. I’d love to chat and figure out how we can help. – justin@clearspring.com
I’m a huge fan of ABC’s TV show LOST. It always seems to be a topic of water cooler conversation. I find myself going to the Web site often to check for the latest video updates about what’s going to happen with the next season of the show.
Well, ABC has launched a new video player that uses Clearspring’s Launchpad. You can now grab the videos from the different shows and share them into any of the different destinations that we support.
From the screenshots above, you can see how easy it was to share. All you have to do is press the plus (+) button on ABC.com or “Share” on the embedded video and Clearspring’s share menu comes up. I embedded the widget below in this blog post just for you guys.
As we talked about a few weeks ago, when you take great content especially video and make it shareable, you’re putting together a recipe for virality.
We have a really dynamite Clearspring team based in the Los Angeles, California area. They work with West coast publishers to identify opportunities for them to utilize Launchpad, AddThis, and our widget media services.
Recently, the team decided to get out of the office and go to a team member’s house, where they could strategize and plan for the future.
At Clearspring, we like to be agile and move pretty fast. Our projects typically don’t take months or years. They take days or weeks. So, every once and a while it, it’s good to slow down and look to see what’s coming up and figure how we can better optimize for the future.
We’re working hard to make sure that we can serve you best when it comes to creating, distributing, managing, tracking, and monetizing your widgets.
If you have any thoughts, ideas, questions, or concerns, about where we are at now or where we’re going in the future, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. You can e-mail me at justin@clearspring.com
Here at Clearspring, we want to send a hearty congratulations to the folks at the blog Widgets Lab. Last week, they celebrated the 2nd anniversary of starting their blog. For a while now, I’ve been reading the blog pretty religiously, as do a lot of folks here.
The widget landscape is pretty new and ever changing. Widgets Lab has done a great job at providing thoughtful insight into what’s happened. We hope they keep at it so we can continue reading their posts for years to come.
I am happy to announce that Clearspring has acquired AddThis, the number one bookmarking and sharing service on the web. We have been happy to introduce several firsts to the social web – cross-platform viral postng tools, widget analytics, and widget advertising. Now we are happy to announce the beginnings of another first for the social web – Universal Sharing. The combined audience of our tools is 200MM unique users and 300K+ publishers. This equates to 20B views/month. And this audience continues to grow at breakneck speeds month-over-month. Over the last two years, Clearspring has developed a scalable platform enabling publishers to make widgets, or embeddable content, easy for users to share to blogs, start pages, desktops and social networks. AddThis has created a great service to enable those same users to share web pages. Together, we are laying the foundation for something great. Specifically, we are now the only company offering a comprehensive, end-to-end, set of sharing tools for web publishers seeking to syndicate embeddable AND page-level content to different services. Our vision is to create an open sharing platform connecting publishers, advertisers, and developers. This platform will enable a true first on the web – enabling users to leverage any web-based service from within the context of any application, anywhere. As we move towards this vision, Clearspring will continue deliver the best widget distribution and monetization services possible and AddThis will continue it’s run towards the goal of becoming the most ubiquitous sharing tool for publishers. Shortly, however, you will start to see the beginnings of this vision come to life. We welcome our friends from AddThis and are excited for what’s to come. As always, hit me up with questions/comments/suggestions – we would not be here without all your help and support. Thanks! Editor’s Note: This was originally posted on Widgify, the blog of Hooman Radfar our CEO and fearless leader here at Clearspring. If you haven’t subscribed to his blog, I’d highly recommend it. He’s big, friendly, and likes hugs. – Justin Thorp
This year Technorati reports some awesome stats. They’ve had 133 million blog records indexed. They’ve seen 7.4 million blogs posted in the last 120 days. They conclude that “blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream. ”
At Clearspring, we believe that this validates our view that blogs are still a major of avenue for which people share content online. Within the blogging space, all in all we’ve integrated Launchpad with WordPress.com, Windows Live Spaces, MySpace blogs, Xanga, Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal and Vox.
I’ve been blogging for 4+ years now on a variety of domains. I’ve shared with my audience my view points, life experiences, and the interesting things I’ve found online. It’s been an incredible opportunity to meet and form community with so many amazing people that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to meet with otherwise.
We were recently discussing different tools we could give to the people to help them understand widgets and the value proposition of Clearspring. We decided to write up a quick white paper. It’s entitled “What’s a Widget and Why Is it Important? (PDF)”
I’d encourage you to download it, read it, and send me comments. Let me know what you think. E-mail me at justin@clearspring.com.
I quickly went to NBC.com to see if they had posted clips from the show. They had. Let me say this… not often do I laugh out loud at stuff that I see. This almost had me shooting Red Bull out my nose.
Instantly my first thought was, I have to share this with my friends. I know a lot of people that don’t watch Saturday Night Live but would find the clip hilarious. With the Clearspring share menu, I could do this with ease. As you see below, I shared and posted it to my Facebook page.
For a while now, here at Clearspring, we’ve had an amazing relationship with NBC. They distribute a lot of their content through our widget platform Launchpad. This is an amazing example of how when you match rad content with shareability you have a great recipe for virality.
