I signed up for a Blidget Pro account this morning after realizing that you can't put a video feed in a Blidget (Widgetbox's feeds widget) unless you pay. It's $3.95 a month and you can go month to month. I wonder if they take the widgets away from their users if you cancel.

I'd beta-tested the Pro features briefly a few weeks ago, and found the online building tool a little cumbersome, and I still do. I'm not one to read documentation, expecting that I should be able to experiment and figure things out in short order. There are still a few things I'd like to see more customizable, like that black border around the body of the feed content and the ability to remove the gradient behind the slide buttons.

It's better than OK, though. I'm just fussy.

A few notes on my little web journey in making it:

- YouTube still doesn't make its feed addresses apparent. You have to go searching for how to construct them, and ironically you find the best results in YouTube explainer videos. In this case I used the YouTube account's username. So the feed is http://youtube.com/rss/username/whitehouse.rss. You can also use tags, like this: http://youtube.com/rss/tag/president+radio+address+obama+weekly+radioaddress.rss but then you'd get wingnuts, and I might play around with a widget including those, or not.

It's the third time in recent weeks that I've wondered how committed Google really is to the distributed web versus keeping users on their pages. For example, Google Gadgets are very easy to add to an iGoogle start page, but the pages containing the embed code (so you can place one on an external page) are kind of hidden – not included as a matter of course in the share button when a user places the gadget. I always have to go on a circuitous hunt for the page if I want to provide the link to embed a Gadget on a blog.

Another example. Steve Gillmor took Google to task for slow Feedburner updates earlier this month. Google acquired Feedburner in 2007. You have to wonder if providing untimely feeds serves Google's interests better than serving up speedy feeds. Do I think Eric Schmidt put in a call to the Feedburner team and ordered a slowdown? No. Do I think it's possible the feeds slowed down for whatever reason, and investing in speeding them up wasn't a priority as high as the priorities for other projects? Maybe.

Black helicopter nonsense? Could be. But a common thread runs through each of the three cases. Technically Google makes things mashable, so they can say "We're open." Practically, they make a masherupper jump through extra hoops, or suffer some penalty, to distribute content on pages that don't earn money for Google. It's their right, of course, but we don't have to help them pretend their policies are completely altruistic. The pattern of pulling back on the reins in little ways is a reminder that Google is a company watching out mainly for its own interests after all.

- Whitehouse.gov had the weekly "radio" address up bright and early Saturday morning. Points for that. Subtract one point for not having the video feed ready yet. The whitehouse channel on YouTube does not, as of 9:50 a.m. Eastern, include the newest Saturday address. Update: it was on YouTube by 11 a.m. Saturday, possibly sooner.

- A funny thing. I didn't represent my widget as an official White House product, and said so in the footer. However, I do like the Obama blue and wanted to match my background color to a shade of it, so I went to whitehouse.gov for a look. This is the background image under the site's main wide horizontal slideshow box. Check the file name, hero_bg.jpg. A worshipper at the keyboard in the Photoshop ranks. That's kind of cute.

- Whitehouse.gov content is licensed under Creative Commons' most permissive attribution license. I learned this the way I discover most news these days, on Twitter, in this case in a tweet from Denise Howell.

Watching my Obama inauguration countdown widget graph shoot up like a city skyline was fun while it lasted. I think the activity has peaked now, and I have some observations and questions. (I haven’t studied widgetry; I’ve just jumped in to make them, so it’s trial and error. I like figuring things out that way.)

On Dec. 18—apparently the day the Clearspring version of the widget was listed in the Google Gadgets directory—install numbers exploded, and built through Friday when the widget was installed more than 10,000 times on that one day. Total installs from Clearspring will reach 110,000 by midnight.

Here’s where some of my questions come in. What caused it to spike like that all of a sudden? I’m not aware of the widget having any special featured status as it has on the Widgetbox home page. Do Clearspring widgets have some special pull with Google? Because my handrolled version of it had been in the Google Gadget gallery for almost a year and was installed only about a 1,000 times total. 

I’m not complaining. It was pretty thrilling to watch the traffic build over the past few weeks. At first I found it very satisfying to watch people installing it—more satisfying than writing a great blog post that gets linked to and read a lot, because people were making a more affirmative gesture, almost like a purchase. As the thrill and my compulsive stats checking faded, I started to question whether the widget was really having all that much impact.

There are barely more views than installs, so many users must be either installing and immediately uninstalling, or never looking at it. Possibly it was passed along via email by users who were enthusiastic about it, only to be installed by their friends who were not so pleased with it. Kind of a disappointment. Is that a common occurrence with Google Gadgets that are primarily put on iGoogle start pages? Could be it’s in the nature of a widget that doesn’t do much, only changing once a day. Also it’s not a typical countdown widget that includes hours, minutes and seconds. It used to, but I limited it to counting whole days early in December after a redesign. One Widgetbox reviewer gave it a single star based on that fact. People like their widget genres to be compliant with norms I guess.

What else did I learn? The same widget on Widgetbox was installed by more Ning users, where it saw many more views per install. I like seeing African-American social networks put it on their Ning pages.

What else? I learned I like making widgets that are seen by more than one person. Just greedy for attention I guess. (Hey, I have to be paid in that way since I don’t earn in any other manner from this work, though I wouldn’t mind cashing in on it. I love widgets—the whole idea of them, their form, the making process, their ease in crossing from sidebar to start page to mobile app, their viral nature, the fact that they are little and therefore cute. Heck, I guess you could say I love most everything about widgets, except for some ham-handed marketers’ attempts to make them into ads.)

I’m not sure exactly what gives a widget that property of being suitable for sidebars rather than start pages, but my bailout widget was more successful in that regard, aided by powerful blog installs including Scripting News and Seeing the Forest. Interestingly, the install on Corrente produced more views than either Dave but demonstrated a lot less viral power. I think that’s somehow a good measure of authority for a blogger. Corrente since has uninstalled it. Overall, the bailout widget’s views-to-installs ratio is about 500:1 compared with the nearly 1:1 ratio for the countdown.

Go figure. I’ll keep experimenting. Hope you’ll follow along and help me figure this stuff out. 

What a handy thing. Did you know that you don’t have to write all the HTML code for a Google Gadget within the XML file? You can specify the content type as URL instead of HTML, and the URL you specify in your XML gadget file is served in an iframe in the gadget. It’s not suitable for everything, like apps that require cookies or a login.

For something like my ”Search This” widget it’s perfect. I’ve built it using Expression Engine to do the work of rotating random entries so there’s no sense in trying to rewrite it in Javascript, or even in using the nice new libraries for PHP and other languages. If the widget took advantage of OpenSocial capabilities, that would be a different story.

The XML for my gadget is dead simple: 

Really! That’s the entire thing.

Here’s where you add my “Search This” gadget to iGoogle, or grab the embed code for a blog. 

This is fun, but I have no idea what’s going on. My inauguration countdown widget must have been featured in a directory or something, because installs started spiking at noon yesterday and it’s seen more than 5,100 installs since then. I can’t locate the impetus. They’re all through Clearspring, and most are marked in the stats as having come from the Google gallery, but Google reports fewer than 100.

I’m new at this—obviously, or I’d have seen to putting in some of my own tracking—so clues would be very welcome. 

Lawrence Coburn discusses three ways to make widgets from RSS feeds.

I’m beta testing Widgetbox’s new premium features for Blidgets, their feeds-to-widget tool.

Grazr is a pretty nice tool for sharing and displaying feeds, too, and has the advantage of accepting OPML files.