Jackson Miller

Dopplr, that cool little loco-blog-thinggy, has finally released a widget for sharing my location on my blog.

Widgets allow my blog to be the hub for all-things-me. I am only using widgets that I feel are useful to readers of my blog. Dopplr location sharing is relevant to me because I am traveling more than I am home. My other favorite widgets at the moment share my microblog (twitter), the music I am listening to, the pictures I am taking, and what people are actually reading on my blog.

What do all of those widgets have in common? They require no additional action by anyone to provide meaningful information.

• I am already managing my travel calendar in Dopplr, now the widget shares that information.
• Last.fm is observing what I am listening to in iTunes and on my iPod
• Flickr is sharing the pictures I am taking with my camera and emailing to share (as Fred Wilson describes here, maybe I should add Twittergram to the process)
• statzen is observing what people are actually reading on my blog and is sharing that as a sort of “best of”. It will expand to include more meta information about what reader of my blog are looking at right then.

Do you know of any other widgets along these lines that I should be using? If coComment was a little easier to integrate into my processes, it might be cool to have a widget showing what I have been commenting on. Even better would be something that combined del.icio.us, my feed reading habits, and my commenting habits to display the blogs / communities that I am most engaged in. But, in order for me to want to use it, it would have to require no additional input like the other widgets I am using.

Anyway, kudos and thanks to the Dopplr team for providing me with another meaningful widget for my sidebar.