Blank (Media) Slate

I play around with a lot of new widgets as they hit the scene, and of the zillion or so I’ve encountered, only a couple seem to have lasting value. Generally, I’m not a personal fan of the time-wasting variety of widgets, but I like the ones that seem to add to effective communication. For example, you can check out the about me page to see the LibraryThing widgets I use to show my reading interests (you can actually browse my complete library, if you’re so inclined). Similarly, each page of this site includes a couple other widgets for illustrating my interests as a tag cloud as well as my LastFM info.

I was recently playing around with the wealth of Amazon widgets you can create. If you haven’t already checked ‘em out, I recommend popping in and seeing what they’ve got cooking. There’s just about every type you can possibly imagine slicing-and-dicing any way you’d probably want. While checking it out, I played with their embedded store widget where you can sell anything you want on your site.

In order to try it out, I looked around my office for something I could sell. My eye landed on the one-of-a kind “J. Trent Adams Modern Man of Action” action figure. My brother made it for me a few years back, and I thought this’d be the perfect thing to sell though this kind of widget. Of course, I’d really rather not let it go, but then again, who’s gonna’ pay me US$500 for something like this?

Now, the reason for this post is that I found another widget from iTunes I’m playing with and I needed the Amazon real estate for it. Rather than toss out the Modern Man of Action one-of-a-kind opportunity, I moved it into this post. At least now it’ll live somewhere in case I want to refer to it in the future… or someone found a hefty chunk of change laying around they want to parlay into something hip.