Tune in live at 10pm ET/7pm PT on Talkshoe - http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/20594

For example, let’s say you wanted to create a widget that is 200 pixels wide and shows the 5 most shared stories from The Inquisitr over the past 30 days. Here’s what that would look like:

You can also see the widget live on a few sites already, including louisgray.com, scribkin, and jeffisageek.

We think the widget makes a lot of sense for publishers for a few reasons. First, since we believe sharing is the ultimate endorsement of content, displaying the “most shared” stories on your site is a great way to link readers to your best stories. Second, we think displaying those stories will get you more intrasite traffic, as readers click the headlines to view the stories displaying in your widget. Finally, we think the widget can improve your share counts, as more people become exposed to the ReadBurner concept and the impact that sharing stories on Google Reader, News Gator, or Netvibes (with other services coming soon!) has on filtering the best content.

Also, while not explicitly the goal of the widget, we’d love to see some interesting mashups as people create widgets for their favorite sites to create custom ways to read the news – for example, setting up a page that shows the most shared stories from the past week from your favorite dozen blogs. Since the widgets can be copied and pasted anywhere, this is totally possible.

There are more features planned for the widget, including custom design options and stat tracking. Definitely let us know what would make it more appealing for you to use as a publisher, or if there are other options you’d like to see just as an end user that encounters the widget on blogs.

_adam

PS - As usual, thanks to Gary Bacon of PixelTalent for the design of the widget

Anyways, we’re very focused on mobile over here at ReadBurner, in fact…we have some sexy bacon cooking behind the scenes that will make you mobile folks salivate.

But until then, you can enjoy http://m.readburner.com

We notice that the traffic to the mobile site skyrockets on the weekend.   Must mean that people are staying connected but getting away from their computers.   That says a lot.   So much so that we’re cooking that bacon real nice and crispy for you.

I have no idea what that means.

Drop your mobile # below for a link to the mobile site.




_drew

_steve

Louis will be our guest tonight on ReadBurner Weekly Live. As usual, we’ll discuss some of the most shared stories from the week, but we’ll also open up the phone lines to callers so you can ask your questions about what this announcement means for ReadBurner and Louis going forward. Tune in live on Talkeshoe at 10pm ET/7pm PT!

Do you want to be a part of something big?  Are you hungry?

We’re growing over here in ReadBurner land, with 1 uber mega super addition being announced very soon.  You could make 2.

If you have CSS/PHP/HTML/Yadda Yadda and graphic design experience and want to work with some really awesome people (us), drop us an email at info @ readburner dot com.

Come eat ramen with us! (TM Alex C.)

_drew

Just letting you know that there will be no ReadBurner Weekly Live this evening as all 3 of us are on the road for those darn day jobs.  But, be sure to tune in next week at 10pm ET / 7pm PT where we’ll be making a very exciting announcement :-)  As for the widget changes we promised on the show last week, check back a bit later tonight hopefully as the option to remove the border should be pushed live, with some additional enhancements coming soon.

_adam

Last night I was a guest on ReadBurner Weekly Live with Drew, Adam, and myself talking on the subject of using shared feeds to get your news from around the blogosphere as well as material for sharing with friends and such.

Thats when I shared with the guys how I took all my feeds, wiped them out, and then built my new system from the ground up. This is what I came up with and what I use today :

This is what I built my foundation with using the great group of people I get shared items from daily via Google Reader. I think the key is to have a large group and have people who have a large base of interests. I have podcasters, social media guru’s, developers, hacker types, geeks in general, and friends. Having such a diverse group to pluck stories from has helped me hit all the different areas out there on the web and has really been a huge success.

The more friends you have on twitter the larger base of information and links are gonna come your way. With twitter I can find out breaking news as it happens again having a wide base of twitter followers to pull information from…with twitter I can get breaking news from around the world, politics, sports, and of course tech. I can get announcements about a service that just launched in real time, people attending conferences or meetups are throwing the hot topics out there or just getting updates that my friends have a new post on their blog.

I know these days twitter has had its moments but overall in the large picture I find it to be a valuable tool for keeping up with those I really wanna have a real time pulse with.

ReadBurner is really a catch all for me to find stories that maybe others outside of my shared items community are finding interesting out there. grabbing the feeds for New, Upcoming, and Top allow me another place to skim for that story, new service, link or whatever be the case.

FriendFeed is the newest tool in my box but in some ways its the most powerful….in fact using FriendFeed I am able to combine the others by getting shared items, Twitter posts, Feedburner items, new Flickr pics, Disqus discussions that are going on, the latest YouTube videos, and even Google Reader FriendFeed page. Some of these are default features or service of FriendFeed while others are enhancements allowed by using scripts using greasemonkey or plugins.

Throw in the recent additions of embedded audio which allows me to monitor my podcasts and rooms which allow me to even dig deeper into certain subjects and FriendFeed has become a powerful tool that I use daily, hourly, and sometimes by the minute.

Closing Thoughts

To tie everything together I feel like I took all my feeds scattered through out my Google Reader and brought them together. I took my shared items and twitter posts from my friends, I added ReadBurner feeds to the mix, topped it off with everything that is shared with my fellow FriendFeeder’s add the ability to integrate Google Reader and ReadBurner right in the service and throw that on a big serving dish.

You have a nice way to feed your information hunger in a clean/organized/relaxing way.