Widgets and Distributing Content

With Olympic fever in full swing this week, the blogosphere and Twittersphere has been buzzing with activity. People are sharing photos and videos from news media outlets and also people who are lucky enough to be in Beijing right now, like Rohit Bhargava.

This is a great example of social media at its finest. People are ‘programming’ the way they experience the Olympics by creating, choosing, consuming and sharing content that appeals to them. While NBC has the exclusive broadcast rights (and it’s still pretty damn cool to watch the competition live in HD), getting Twitter updates from people like Rohit and others about what they’re seeing gives us a nice perspective that didn’t exist before.

How can media companies take part in this? Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester blogged about how media companies and corporations should make their content embeddable. The blog post stems from a slideshow of photos of the Olympics which he posted on his blog. Jeremiah had found the slideshow on Sean Percival’s blog but later learned that the photos are originally from the Boston Globe. Missed opportunity? Jeremiah writes:

“The Boston Globe should have created the images in an embeddable media player or slide player that allows the images to quickly be shared from blogs, facebook profiles, and anywhere else those may talk about the Olympics. They should have links back to their site, give due credits, and even make a dynamic “learn more” at the end of the slideshow that they can change at will to recommend other content as it comes around. There are many widget developers that offer these services, that can also help content spread within Facebook and other social networks.”

In the world of the distributed web and the anti-portal, everyone can be considered a new distribution channel. A simple “Click Here For More” link turns a photo or video in the wild to a gateway back to your website. For your advertising types, think of it as an ad unit which takes the form of ‘earned’ media. You’ve created interesting content which people feel is worthy of sharing with their world of friends and followers.