Following up on my post with a couple of widgets that follows 52 Iran Twitterers who are on the ground in Iran, here are two widgets that take a different approach. These track “IranElection” keywords (or slight variations of that) on Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Flickr & YouTube. If people send in great blogs that are focused on the IranElection, I’ll add those as well. And if you notice Twitter spammers, send a note. I will block them with our spam blocker. (The suggestion box on the right side of the large widget is oh-so-handy).

Here’s the sidebar size widget:

Embed code for this sidebar widget:
<script type=’text/javascript’>tfoSite = ‘508′; tfoHeight = ”; tfoHost = ‘www.thingfo.com’; tfoWidth = ‘300′</script><script type=’text/javascript’ src=’http://www.thingfo.com/socialsite/js/widget.js’></script>

And here is the larger size, this has the same content — all displayed chronologically — with an easy way to contact the widget creator (me) and offer suggestions:

Embed code for this full-size widget with suggestion box:
<iframe width=”750″ scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ height=”1350″ src=”http://www.thingfo.com/socialsite/v2/508/fullpage” allowtransparency=”true”></iframe>

We hope you can use these to track the activity, post them on your blog or website, or come over to www.thingfo.com and create your own!

Here are some widgets you can use to follow the Iran Election. The first is a widget that follows 52 Twitterers on the ground in Iran. The list was put together by The Road to the Horizon. (thank you!). If anyone has another IranElection twitterer they think should be included, send a note via the “suggestion” box on the right-side of the larger widget, or email info at thingfo dot com directly.

The widget below is currently tracking 52 Twitterers. Here’s the sidebar size:

Embed code for this sidebar widget:
<script type=’text/javascript’>tfoSite = ‘514′; tfoHeight = ”; tfoHost = ‘www.thingfo.com’; tfoWidth = ‘300′</script><script type=’text/javascript’ src=’http://www.thingfo.com/socialsite/js/widget.js’></script>

And here is the larger size, this has the same content — 52 Twitterers in Iran, with an easy way to contact the widget creator (me) and offer suggestions:

Embed code for this full-size widget with suggestion box:
<iframe width=”750″ scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ height=”1600″ src=”http://www.thingfo.com/socialsite/v2/514/fullpage” allowtransparency=”true”></iframe>

Thanks again to The Road to the Horizon for putting the list of Iranian Twitterers on the ground in Iran. Any suggestions, send our way. More IranElection widgets coming in the next blog post!

Greetings friends, Romans… fans of the social web. We’ve introduced a new view for your Thingfos — now in addition to publishing your social streams via mini-widget, you can publish them Full-Page style.

The Daily Galaxy made themselves a full page Thingfo to publish real-time news related to space science and environment news.

The DailyGalaxy’s new Thingfo-powered page beautifully displays the latest from all the best science Twitter feeds, gives a reply link to each post if the user feels compelled to join the conversation, and invites visitors to suggest more keywords and top users to follow!

This example shows how Thingfo can connect a website to the internet’s continual generation of content around very specific topics with a combination of user and keyword searches. And, the creators of this stream can keep on top of the latest with Thingfo analytics (login required).

Thingfo always gives great ways to plug into the universe of the Social Web, and now we offer whole new ways for you and your brand to interact with your virtual community. Check it out, your visitors will love the content stream, and you will love the spam control and built-in social analytics!

Great video of Mike getting inteviewed by Startup Lucky’s Aronado Placencia on Cinco de Mayo. Mike talks about ThingFo and has some really interesting things to say about getting a startup off the ground. Aronado is an excellent interviewer, he has great energy and an understanding of the startup scene. Plus, we always appreciate anyone who starts off an interview by playing an old Cheech and Chong scene. So freaking awesome!

Enjoy:

And here’s the video interview on its original page on StartupLucky.com. StartupLucky rocks, we hope to do more with them soon!

That’s right, we just launched a new, improved version of SocialSite, the CMS for the social web from Thingfo. First, we made the service faster and added more traffic capacity, to support our growing user base.

And because so many of our users manage more than one site, brand, or persona, we’ve added a key piece of functionality — now, instead of managing one widget with your account, we’ve given you the ability to manage multiple widgets (and the highly targeted social searches that go with them) with one login.

For each widget you set up, whether it’s tracking a bunch of Twitters or Twitterers, a mix of social media content for your site, brand or topic, you can independently moderate content, track activity levels and top users with reports, and customize the look and feel to fit in with your site. SocialSite now gives you access and control over social web content for your brands, sites or interests - all in one place.

Go ahead and try it out, you can sign up right here http://www.thingfo.com

We’ll be launching some more top-requested features soon, with additional ways to publish your content and connect with your audiences. In the meantime, we love feedback and ideas, so please feel free to say hello on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thingfo or shoot us an email to “info” at thingfo.com.

TGIF!

The New Media Summit and Celebration, presented by Netroots Nation and the Netroots Arts and Education Initiative, happens today at the Bently Reserve, The summit is sold out, but there are still tickets available for the evening celebration, where our founder Mike Grishaver may even give out some free pro SocialSite accounts to select progressive bloggers and websites!

The summit, which features speakers like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and staff from sites like MoveOn.org and Daily Kos will focus on using new media to promote causes and organizations, which, of course, Thingfo’s SocialSite excels at.

Choose from sessions on blogging, viral video, mobile campaigns, social networking and much more. Then, stick around us for an open bar, hors d’oeuvres, special guests, live music and dancing into the night.

This event looks like so much fun we put together the SocialSite widget you see embedded on the right to keep track of all the twitters, flickr photos, youtube videos, delicious bookmarks, and blogs it will generate. Grab it for your site and spread the New Media Summit & Celebration, in inimitable SocialSite-style.

Hope to see you there!

Yet another great website has started using SocialSite!

OK, first - you might not have checked out FORA.tv yet, so if you have some free time please just click that link there and come back after you’ve explored a bit. It will take a bit to get decent taste, though, so if you want to wait until you have more time to kick back and really explore I don’t blame you. Read on and I’ll do my best to not waste too much valuable virtual ink describing this increasingly popular, ever-growing treasure-trove of timely, intelligent, fascinating videos which aim to “Fuel the Enlightenment” .

Check out that capture. How can any video site that organizes itself into the categories “The Economy,” “Green,” “Politics,” “Science,” “Technology,” and “Culture” fail to appeal to the enormous collection of thinkers and doers gathered around the internet?  If you’re not lured in by those top five videos (which, ok, may be a little specialized, although “Edible Education“? Yes, please!), right underneath begins the list of featured videos, which cover orgasms, Jesus on a pancake, military suicides, and the possible Skyping habits of Bernie Madoff. Still nothing? OK, try the tag cloud:

I know, right? It would be fun just to come back every little while and watch “Election 2008″ shrink and “The Bailout” grow. Or is that just me?

Regardless, this site is a powerhouse. It takes the success of TED and expands on it, posting new videos of important, active, dynamic speakers all the time, from everywhere, about everything. Such a smart collection, where every video begins with a woman’s voice intoning, “The World… Is Thinking,” brings in a smart audience, as FORA CEO Blaise Zerega recognizes in the video below from a BEET.tv roundtable.

The realization Zerega mentions that “our big value is our audience” has led FORA.tv to a serious engagement with the internet’s community and social-content driven evolution known as Web 2.0. The main FORA.tv site cultivates a free, full-featured membership based community, allowing comments, ratings, and saving favorites while providing feeds, downloads and podcasts. Meanwhile, a variety of the FORA.tv staff write a very cool blog which nicely appreciates and interacts with their audience. The blog breaks news (parnerships with WIRED and The Economist! available on iTunes!) and gives some behind-the-scenes insights about the business while exploring and encouraging the burgeoning FORA.tv community. Their regular “Twanks” feature, as an example, showcases the best weekly tweets about the site and even provides capsule bios of the tweeters who tweeted them.

All that said, I feel very happy to announce that the FORA.tv blog has begun using our always powerful, always flexible SocialSite widget system to enhance and follow-through on their commitment to their community while promoting the FORA.tv content and brand. Now they and their readers can see, from the blog page (or wherever anyone embeds it!), all the twitters, diggs, delicious, flickr photos and inbound blogs mentioning FORA.tv, as well as blog and YouTube posts. With our new administration features FORA will be able to track all the activity the widget displays - so they can not only find the best tweets, but see who’s tweeting most, who’s dugg them over and over again, and who’s written them and their content up repeatedly or started a fan blog. They have a growing audience, they have a smart audience, and I selfishly and sincerely applaud their smart choice of ThingFo’s SocialSite to interact with and encourage it.

Do you have a smart audience? Then I selfishly and sincerely urge you to let them know you think so with your own SocialSite widget. Request an invitation today.

You should be!

http://twitter.com/thingfo

I really dig the range of groups and people that use SocialSite widgets. On my last post I wrote about the Sacramento Kings, and the latest site to come to my attention seems (granted, in a shallow, stereotypical kind of way) the exact opposite: civilibrarian.com. From jocks to nerds, everyone loves SocialSite!

Written by Chris Freeman, a Branch Services Manager at the Sacramento Public Library, this interesting blog chronicles the thoughts and experiences of someone passionately involved in both the public library system and the quickly-changing internet. He muses over the implications for his line of public service of Netflix, Twitter, easily created QR Codes (Quick Reference codes, you’ve probably seen them, they look like this: and when you snap a picture of them with your smartphone they act as a URL) and the other emergent aspects of what we clumsily label Web 2.0. He points out the ways libraries should be or are responding to these technologies and provides snapshots of working life in a somewhat embattled local library system in engagingly written posts. Fascinating, well-thought-out stuff, making his use of and interest in Thingfo’s Socialsite widget (which, in his post calling attention to it, he calls a “pretty cool little tool”) nicely flattering.

He describes how he’s using us this way:

Basically, Thingfo lets me pull all kinds of content that I define through feeds comprised of usernames, rss feeds, videos, blog posts, and blog comments from sites like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Delicious, Digg, Blogger, Wordpress, and more… It seems like libraries could pull together an awful lot of customer and staff-created online social content in one place on a website.

Thanks, Chris. Couldn’t put it better myself. In fact, I couldn’t end this post better than with another snip from his writeup: “And it’s all free!”

But I can’t stop myself: this widget is a slam dunk!

I’ll hold back now.

Seriously, though, what a widget.

The Kings have taken their purple-and-white colors and stuck them on one of our SocialSite Widgets, and I think the result is outstanding. The Kings are definitely ahead of the pack here (kind of a basketball metaphor, more a racing one, so I’ll let it go), judging by this widget our system should get more and more use from professional sports teams. We provide superb functionality perfectly made for the kind of Web 2.0 presence a major team generates, whether it’s the NBA, the NCAA, or the NHL.

These guys are a perfect example. There’s a lot going on around the web about the Sacramento Kings. There’s their official and extensive NBA page, their team fullcourtpress page, which features blogs from players, staff, and even dance team members, assorted team pages from sports networks, periodicals and major web portals from CBS to Sports Illustrated to Yahoo!, a grab bag of fan blogs, official and unofficial twitters, a YouTube Channel, flickr photos, and legions of diggs and del.icio.us bookmarks. Of course, most of these have incoming references and posts.

There’s no way to keep track of it all, and really harness the power of all that Web 2.0 social content… until SocialSite! Using our widget, the Kings get the results of 44 searches (!) across 8 separate feeds (which, of course, can be updated and expanded at any time) pumping directly to the widget on their KingsConnect page, and available to be embedded by any of their fans, just like I’ve embedded it in this post.

The Kings SocialSite Widget takes the team’s brand and shows how far it reaches across the web in a way that would be impossible without our tech. It brings official team news, mainstream media, and a host of internet content and home-brewed fan sites and mixes them together in a small, accessible, and powerful little corner of their website. I think it more than justifies all the excitement we at Thingfo have been feeling about SocialSite all along, and I’m glad it’s out there spreading the word about our great tool - as soon as more teams jump on board (and man, seeing this widget, it’s inevitable!) you know I’ll let you know!

They shoot! They score! Sorry… but it’s true.