It appears to be a good idea, actually. You have the new Tagometer widget, ready for use on your site. It's full of javascript-y goodness, and it looks all cool and stuff. Right? Then somebody bookmarks your page. They tag it with "monkeybuttloving." The Dean calls your house, and you're expelled from Harvard. Then, instead of becoming the President of the United States, you're working for Microsoft. This isn't the only potential flaw I see for this widget, it's also ugly. This, coming from somebody who wouldn't know design-skills if it hit him in the head with a shovel. I can understand the boxy, "undesign" nature of the thing, but it just looks terrible. It's also gigantic. To put the widget in your sidebar, you'll need a 200px by 110px area, so it'll look right. That's not that big (the image ads on the sidebar are 120px x 90px). But they do tend to command a lot of presence on a page, for just one small widget. There's a vertical bar that takes up about as much space, only flatter and wider (I can't show you that one, because of the way WordPress handles line-breaks). I do applaud them for coming up with something new. Showing off your stats is what has helped FeedBurner become so popular, and helps the site get new subscribers, since "135 other people subscribe, it must be worth subscribing to!" But, if nobody subscribes to your page? It's hard to get people to get your feed with that "2 subscribers," using the same logic. If I was at del.icio.us, I'd be working on something like Roots. Using the same concept of a line of javascript, it's an actually useful tool, and can show off the power of your service, without intruding on the page itself. This also plays to the nature of what you want the widget to do for you. Earlier, I mentioned the FeedBurner effect, with visitors subscribing to a page - because everybody else subscribes to it. That's the hope with the del.icio.us Tagometer, and what Roots was meant to save us from. Those who are interested in that sort of thing might know what to look for, and those who have no clue what the widget means would learn by clicking. Hopefully, the advertising works in your favor. The curious could click the Ma.gnola icon (like I have on the bottom of this page), though it's not as obvious as the Tagometer. It doesn't muck up your layout with some dubious tagging. The problem I see with the Tagometer is that you're at the mercy, and giving free advertising, to other people on the internet, with no way to filter it. At least with Roots, I'm not broadcasting the monkey butt-loving.

status: published
lastmod: '2006-12-21T18:27:09.000Z'
author: John Stansbury
cms: wordpress
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  similarterms: widget delicious sidebar idea window page area tend presence command image gigantic undesign boxy nature thing terrible small space default