They have long supported charitable works by their employees and users, with the latest effort combining star power and Yahoo Answers to bolster the Up Close 2007 campaign to benefit Unicef.

I don’t know who’s smarter, Nick Wilson for writing this excellent post on linkbaiting tactics for 2007, or Danny Sullivan for persuading him to publish this post (which is blatant linkbait itself) on Search Engine Land. Regardless, it’s a great read.

GigaOM – MySpace Blocking Widgets? Om Malik is out with a post about MySpace blocking widgets and blogs a screen shot from Photobucket which reads:

Widgets will be one of the handiest link development tools of 2007.

Fred Wilson predicts the death of the page view in 2007 as a key metric for web businesses.

I first met Lawrence Coburn when we presented together on a Public Relations panel during a WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Boston. Lawrence told a great story about being at the right place at the right time and taking proper advantage to build publicity for his web site, RateItAll.com.

I don’t know if you guys noticed, but Alexa redesigned the site widgets, offering a cleaner, more appealing web 2.0 face. This really had to come. The old widgets were designed in an 1984 trend.

Widgetbox, an online directory for syndicated web “widgets,” or small interactive services that can be embedded onto a webpage or blog, formally announced its launch on Monday, after completing a private and public beta.

As Richard MacManus opined, Widgets are the New Black. Widgets are particularly popular within social networks and on blog sidebars, extending the reach or news, websites, and product of services.

TechCrunch is reporting that third-party MySpace widgets such as those by the ever popular YouTube are no longer allowed to have link throughs.

If you have a TypePad blog, ease of use just got easier with TypePad Widgets.

TypePad has rolled out a nice new feature that bring dozens of widgets to your blog from other Web sites like Flickr, Technorati, FeedBurner and more.

Some interesting moves going on with the free WordPress.com hosted blog service in the area of ease of use in design and layout that adds to its attraction as an alternative to TypePad, the hosted service you pay for.

Google has some Mac OS Dashboard widgets they put up this week.

The mini-applications provided by Yahoo after its purchases of Pixoria/Konfabulator have received some new entries and a tweaked engine to run them.

The previously unknown market space for gadgets now has a crowd containing Apple, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Dropshipping is a topic that I first addressed in my column way back in April, 2003, which is decades ago in Internet years.

Sunnyvale-based Yahoo has purchased Konfabulator, which introduced the “widget” concept on the Mac in 2002.

This says it all about the folks behind the latest version of Konfabulator, an application that lets you run a wide range of programs called widgets on your desktop.

Last night I was in town and treated myself to the new OSX – Tiger. This afternoon I’ve installed it and have been playing around with it – asking myself how it will improve my blogging.

One of the most mundane tasks a web programmer or designer faces is the creation of (many) buttons. It is a tedious task.