This time last year, VC firms had already invested nearly $60 million into widget-related companies like Slide and WidgetBox. AOL got caught up in the widget craze too, and gobbled up desktop and web app-maker Goowy Media. Was it a hasty investment—like the one the company admitted it made when it bought out Bebo for $850 million during the social media rush the previous year?...

Traffic: bloggers want it, Widgetbox has it. The world's first and largest widget community announced today at the BlogWorld Expo the launch of the Widgetbox Blog Network, a federation of bloggers and online content publishers that fosters connections across the Widgetbox network through 29 vertical channels. The new channels instantly extend reach, drive traffic, increase brand awareness, and expose blogs to new readers. With more than 200,000 blogs, over 135,000 widgets, and 64 million unique monthly viewers, the Widgetbox Blog Network reaches across the web and around the globe...

Widgetbox, one of the web’s largest widget creation and distribution platforms, is launching a new blog network and becoming a destination site in the process. Widgetbox’s homepage will now feature 29 blog channels ranging from parenting to technology. Each channel will include a lists of the most active stories in the network, as well as a leaderboard rewarding the most prolific and popular writers. Leaderboards use a normalized acceleration algorithm to ensure that content from both large and smaller blogs will appear regularly...

We’re here at the SWAT Summit in San Francisco, a conference on advertising and marketing inside social networks. This morning’s session is on Social Advertising Case Studies. Presenting are: Helen Har, VP of Advertising Sales, imeem; Warren Ackerman, Principal and VP, Affinitive; Mike La Rotonda, CEO & CPO, Votigo; and Will Price, CEO, Widgetbox. Each case study involves Facebook in different ways. Here are notes from their case study presentations...

Widgetbox, the world’s first and largest widget community, today announced new features and increased support for its Custom Galleries by Widgetbox. Custom Galleries allow online networks across the web to offer personalized widget options for their users. With more than 70,000 widgets and 45 million unique monthly viewers on over 929,000 domains, Widgetbox is home to the world’s largest widget community and is in a unique position to offer unrivalled choice and access to online networks that are under increasing pressure to sustain user and community loyalty...