Site creation toolkit and host Zude picked up a little Earth Day buzz from Heroes star Panettiere. Her Zude profile will host sales of her clothes beginning April 28th. Social commerce marketplace provider Shopit said it will provide the e-commerce function for the promotion:

A sizeable selection of Hayden’s wardrobe—from designer dresses to everyday t-shirts and active wear—will be available for purchase starting April 28, 2008. Recent items for sale on ‘Panettiere Closet’ have included: an Alice + Olivia pleated black & white silk dress with the Hale Bob black bowtie shoes Hayden wore to the premiere of Milo Ventimiglia’s It’s a Mall World; a Dooney & Bourke handbag; and a Vera Wang Lavender Label pleated white dress.

“Now that we are giving fans the ability to open their own ‘Panettiere Closet’ we can raise a lot more money to help the whales,” Panettiere commented. “When I was on that surfboard in Japan, floating so close to the pilot whales and dolphins, they were the most graceful animals, like big swimming teddy bears. We were powerless to stop the hunting that day, but with the help of my fans, we can do more, build greater awareness, and fund bigger protests and activities to stop this slaughter.”

The promotion will offer users of Shopit’s widgets the opportunity to sell Panettiere’s threads on their sites through those same widgets.  We would suggest a nice way to boost this effort would be for the star to update her blogging on the Save The Whales Again page. Her last entry was on January 15th. Someone please, save the cheerleader’s blog!

But the real strength of Zude the website builder shines as demonstrated by a Kentucky grandmother, an enthusiastic Zude user. McNeil said content on the web and on the desktop don’t easily mesh, yet the Zude approach makes a Facebook profile as easy to embed and share on Zude as a Word document on the C: drive.

Cross-domain drag and drop has been a hallmark feature of Zude. It’s dead simple to move elements around on a page. When using it, one has to think, yes, this is how I expect something like this to work.

The underlying technology, Open5G, probably serves as the best case study for understanding what Web 2.0 actually means, once one separates the dogmatists from the dogma. Open5G offers an application server, a database engine, and the Open5 language, available under an open source license.

This technology treats objects dragged onto a Zude page as being within a container. The individual can edit the behavior of that container to act in different ways, based on what the person viewing it does with the object, like clicking or doing a mouseover of it.

McNeil told WebProNews the beauty of Zude comes to people as they use it. People start with a rudimentary approach, and the more they use it, the more they do so and progress to add content with greater depth.

“Zude is a way for you to pull together what’s relevant to you,” he said. And that’s just how it works.

I’d add to their lists “Zude” which will be out in early May. It’s a Web service, sort of like MySpace, but that goes way beyond. You can drag and drop things around, and a lot more. TechCrunch wrote that up.

I asked lots of people what their favorites were, and Spock (a personal search engine) was the answer I heard most.

What was the best stuff you saw (if you went)?

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