TechBloggin.com

Texty is a dead simple but useful new internet service that you can use to quickly create and edit content on a web page with zero HTML or programming skills.

Go to the site, start typing text in a WYSIWYG editor, format it and add images. Click a button and get an embed code. Your text will appear in whatever website you add the code to. And if you want to make changes, go back to Texty and edit it. The changes will flow to whatever sites you’ve embedded it on. You can also add comment functionality to a piece of text, and create a RSS feed.

There are lots of great and easy to use content management systems on the web already. Blogging software is just one example. But if someone is working on a web page outside of something like a blog and wants to add a bit of text and graphics, this is a good solution. See our coverage of JS-Kit which has similar tools. I was surprised at how many people are looking for something exactly like this.

I’ve embedded a bit of text and an image below. Everything below this paragraph, including the image, is actually embedded from Texty.

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Source: Michael Arrington

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Web widget provider JS-Kit has been doing a lot of growing up since starting as a simple commenting widget, founder Lev Walkin’s pet project in his off hours. Since then, that single widget has grown into a company with the addition of CEO Kris Loux, 12 engineers from Filmloop, and today’s $1.2 million round of financing led by the Entrepreneur’s Fund III.

JS-Kit’s library of widgets make it dead simple to add interactivity to your site. They have widgets for commenting, rating, polls, top rated content, and a combination for rated comments. Each of the widgets is fully skinable by CSS and only require a couple lines of code to add. Each of the widgets use javascript and are linked to page elements by the URL of the page or a customized id property.

Over 5,000 sites have added the widgets, adding 1,000 more each month. Combined, the sites generate over 70 million impressions each month. They’ve already got some ideas of how they want to monetize that traffic. One route is dropping advertisements into the widgets. Rather than putting ads in all the widgets, they’ve decided to only put ads in the “top rated content” widget. Publishers can either keep the ads and split the revenue 50/50, or pay about $40 a month/1 million pageviews your widget gets.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is one client which has simply opted to pay. They originally added the widget to their site to save themselves unnecessary development time. We made a similar choice when adding their ratings widget to CrunchBase.

Widgets as white labeled website features is a useful concept for publishers who don’t want to re-invent the wheel. Kickapps has done this somewhat with social networking. However, JS-Kit still has a bit to go in making their widgets viable for larger clients. As easy to use as JS-Kit’s widgets are, it’s a tough proposition to ask larger businesses to hand hosting and control of their user’s data to JS-Kit. Businesses that depend the most on these features (and would therefore pay the most) may choose to spend the time to develop the feature in house to hedge against any future risk from depending on a web service.
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Tags: widget, comments, ratings, techcrunch, web2.0

Source: Nick Gonzalez

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