The evolution from linkbait to widgetbait

[mandy]

The holy grail of linkbaiting in 2007 will be the widget.

In late 2005 and early 2006, I came up with a linkbaiting concept to put my previous company, Performancing, on the social media map. That idea was the Performancing Blog Editor Firefox extension that has achieved nearly half a million downloads on Mozilla alone...

Widgets are small pieces of software that can be ported easily. This would include plugins for blog software such as WordPress or Drupal, modules that can be plugged into popular "start pages" such as Netvibes, PageFlakes or Live.com, desktop widgets such as Yahoo Widgets or Mac dashboard widgets and, as demonstrated above, browser extensions...

full article: http://searchengineland.com/070118-074231.php

commentary on the article:

The evolution from linkbait to widgetbait probably owes a lot to broadband, and the success of interactive applications in recent months. In the beginning, linkbait was textual in nature, not only requiring tremendous creativity and writing/presentation ability, but also consistent pressure on the pulse of the Web. And that makes it more difficult, especially on a network now thriving on video and games.

What it didn't require was money, and the limited shelf life (i.e., sudden, short bursts of in-coming links) was a tight fit for the investment. Textual linkbaiting has entertainment value, but utility provides more long-term results. And utility costs money. Nonetheless, the successor to textual linkbait, the on-site tool developed from functional scripts...

full article: http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports...iting.html