Delegate tally (and We Don't Need No Stinkin' Widget Industry) 

MSNBC has a lot of nice new interactive stuff and they seem to have embraced the concept of sharing, even doing on-air promos directed at bloggers about the network site's newly embeddable videos.

Couple suggestions, one little and picky, one more strategic:

- The delegate tally widget, with the cool rollovers showing more granular state detail, needs to be displayed a little bigger than the default size, if you want to play with the detail, but it doesn't go up so gracefully with some of the graphics distorted. It's too wide for a sidebar anyway, so might as well let it go big. Also, are Obama's California delegates not included? Can't locate them in the bar, couldn't be that few.

- If I were planning future MSNBC online features, I'd go even further with RSS feeds to encourage people to mash up existing content. For instance, provide a separate feed of Chris Matthews's "Big Number" feature or provide it as a pre-made sidebar widget.

Offer a separate feed of Olbermann's "Worst Persons in the World" with video enclosures and links to related stories on the site. I could totally see Facebook app developers making things out of the worst person data, and it would drive traffic to the network site.

Companies have blogger relations personnel now. Do you suppose at some point in a year or so there will be Facebook app developer relations flacks? Director of Faceappeloper Relations.

Nah. One reason that won't happen is because an industry is being built around widgets. Solo masheruppers soon won't be seen as relevant by site publishers, who will be dazzled by the emerging Web 2.0 widget builders/hosters. If you're not "fundable" you don't exist in this climate, just read Techcrunch and that becomes pretty clear. That makes me kind of sad.

We also don't need a widget industry -- widgets don't need to be outsourced. CMS admins need to get a little creative by thinking in terms of category feeds and supplementary templates. Most sites could generate their own little bits of shareable content with a little upfront work and no ongoing maintenance.