Quietly, while The Guardian has been spending millions on its recent site relaunch, someone there was savvy enough to try a simpler, less costly approach to some features.
Scroll down the right column of the Lost In Showbiz blog, and you’ll see “Our Faves.” It displays items from a Guardian account on the popular social bookmarking service Delicious (which also got a major facelift recently).
You’ll see a similar sidebar feature on two other Guardian blogs: PDA and Deadline USA.
An especially nice touch on Lost in Showbiz is that the Faves box includes a “Your Faves” tab, which invites Delicious-using readers to bookmark relevant Web pages with the tag Showbizspotted. Pages tagged that way through Delicious will display on the Guardian blog, under the “Your Faves” tab.
Further down in the Lost in Showbiz right sidebar you’ll see another box, “Latest Fashion and Showbiz blog posts,” featuring headlines pulled from five non-Guardian blogs. The Guardian used Yahoo Pipes to gather and sort feeds from those blogs. This content is delivered to the Guardian site via a Google Gadget.
So what?
Delicious, Google Gadgets, and Yahoo Pipes: None of these services are owned or were built by The Guardian. However, they all do the job required — for free.
Culturally, this is a hard thing for many news organizations. (“We can’t control it!”) Increasingly, though, they’re learning that integrating other online services into their site tends to work better than unwieldy custom software. It’s not just cheaper — it’s also much, much quicker.
Other Guardian blogs also capitalize on features powered by third-party tools. Roy Greenslade offers a Google Calendar widget. The News blog and Mortarboard blog, among others, include a Technorati-powered, blog-specific search — rather than using The Guardian’s own site search. (On the Technology blog the site search box also displays reactions from elsewhere in the blogosphere.) The Science blog includes a Twitter balloon widget that displays tweets from the Mars Phoenix lander mission. Finally, Deadline USA includes a Vodpod widget of recommended videos.
This is a cheap, creative way to add dynamic content to your site for free. I’m surprised that more news sites aren’t doing it. Is yours? Also, what widgets would you love to see used on news sites? Please comment below.
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