Syber Blog

Personal Life Media’s Brand New Widget

Susan Bratton, the CEO of Personal Life Media (a lifestyle themed podcasting network), rang me up the other day to excitedly tell me about a new widget they’re releasing and announcing at the New Media Expo this week. Normally, I’m not a fan of widgets, as they tend to horribly slow down my web browsing experience on the shameful excuses for computers I use.

Susan knows about my disdain for most widgets, though, and quickly explained what was so great about this one.

“This player also supports the downloadable content development community by giving podcasters an easy way to promote their shows,” Susan told me. “Until we created this application, there were no multi-player audio widgets available on the market.”

There are probably a hundred and one variety of audio players out there, but when it comes down to easily embedding audio into a blog post, you’ve narrowed the field significantly. We tend to alternate here at Mashable between a few different solutions. We have a home grown solution that we sort of reverse engineered out of Google Reader, we occasionally use the Odeo player, and when we utilized Podango’s platform, we’d use their custom player.

All of these widgets lack the ability to do what the new PLM widget can do, which is showcase a podcast’s entire channel, as opposed to just one episode, and unlike many audio players is designed to be viral with easy embedding options. Embedding has always been something of a difficult matter in most blog CMS systems - the contortions we must go through to embed audio in our installation on Mashable make most us wish we were better at Yoga.

What gives this player an edge is it not only is designed for a single podcast situation, but is a player that can showcase “channels” of content, or multiple podcasts. There have been a number of podcast hosts playing with the channel concept from very early on in the podcast movement, most notably Podango, but none have offered a single web player that showcases the content thusly.

Another defining feature of the player widgets is the customization features available - your favorite color doesn’t have to be beige or grey. You can brand it with logos of your publication or even create, as Personal Life Media has done, players branded with sponsor images and logos as a value-add for advertisers.

Anyone interested in brewing up their own podcast widget, head on over to PLM’s widget creator. The widget is free to any producers, companies and fans.

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