Welcome back! It's good to see you again. Please note that I am now publishing all new material at my hub site: In Context Blog

You’re it, man, you’re it.

By Now many of you will have read about the new advertising system over at http; SquidOffers. If not, here is the scoop from The Mighty Godin (long may he reign):

So we invented SquidOffers, which I hope will work for us, and which I fully expect will show up in other places soon. The idea is to combine the voting mechanism of Reddit or Digg or Plexo with the text ad mindset of a Google ad. But instead of an ad, it’s an offer.

Make an offer. Pick a category. Pay a small fee ($100 a month). Then, our users vote on the offers. Get a lot of votes and you rank more highly, which means more clicks. And you don’t pay for the clicks.

Now there’s an incentive to write better and better offers (but they need to be genuine or we boot you). Offer a free sample or a free issue or a consult or an ebook. Be generous. Get permission to follow up.

It was intriguing enough that I set up an offer as soon as I read about it. The offer went live Monday. See it here. What do I think?

* It was easy enough to create and pay for my offer (paypal).
* Choosing a category is hard, and I made a mistake with the category my offer is displayed in but there is no mechanism to change it
* Initially our paid-for offers were competing against entrenched place-holders, they have been zeroed now
* Offers are not particularly visible, only the top 5 display at all, and the best screen real estate is given over to adsense. The bottom offer will be below the fold on many monitors.
* There is not much voting action. I am lucky my offer is (was?) among the most popular but I had to ask for votes on Darrens blog comments to get them.
* I can’t see any incentive for people to vote up offers. It might be an idea for a vote-down button for people to junk spam, of course this would create its own problems.
* You should be able to see who voted. Right now it is way open to abuse.
* The advertiser screen is hard to find and pretty much useless. It only shows your offer, run dates and a delete link. Where are the visitor, page view and click-through stats?

I would like to send a hearty shout-out to Frank at What’s the Next Action for reaching out to everyone and setting up the GTD network at Feedburner. I think that this is a fantastic new resource for keeping up with the latest GTD news and conversation. Check out the new RSS Feed button at the top-left, or subscribe to new posts via email, and be sure to click on the GTD Network panel below that for the “total experience”.

You may also want to visit the Squidoo Lens and vote for your favorite GTD Blog! There is a lot of information on GTD in general, and new features are being added every day.

Check out a couple of new blogs here:
Chris Yeung is blogging on GTD,
and Kara has a very impressive blogging schedule here.

Finally, check out this page at BNET for their “Crash Course in GTD”. That is all for now, stay tuned for upcoming posts on Writing Content and Natural Planning.

I was reviewing the Ultimate GTD Index this morning, and I followed the link to this post ( Shift Happens ). You need to go there and watch the video. Then come back and finish reading.
It’s okay, I’ll wait.

You may have noticed a button on the right-hand sidebar of To Do or Else, all the way at the bottom, called Blidget Badge. The mission:

Wigetbox widgets make blogging better, smarter and easier.
We Make Widgets Come AliveOnce a widget is on your blog, you can reconfigure it to your heart�s content without going near HTML. Developers can fix bugs and upgrade your widget�s functionality without you having to re-install the HTML code.
We Make Your Blog Smarter

Widgetbox widgets can respond to your blog posts and website content. We call these widgets �Tag Aware�. Here�s some things you can do with it. We�ll be adding more smart blog features in the coming months.
Widget Panels

Widgetbox widget panel lets you drag and drop widgets onto a special panel in your blog. Never deal with widget installation again!

How very interesting. I took a few minutes to build a blidget, you can find it in the upper left sidebar. Check it out. Let me know what you think you can do with this. I will play with it some more, and give an update.

UPDATE: Lawrence Coburn at Sexy Widget posts a review of WidgetBox here:

Widget service provider Widgetbox (site, review) has just launched Blidgets � a tool that lets publishers convert RSS feeds into Flash widgets.

Widgetbox joins SpringWidgets and MuseStorm as providers of Flash RSS widgets, along with start pages like YourMinis and PageFlakes.

Converting your RSS feed into a widget with Widgetbox has a couple of advantages. For example, the Blidget tool makes it easy to add an image to your widget, which can be helpful for branding or presentation purposes. Publishing a widget through Widgetbox also signs you up for Widgetbox�s free stats package which tracks page views by date and page views by domain. Finally, there�s a distribution aspect as well. Publishing with Widgetbox automatically drops you into Widgetbox�s widget gallery, which in my opinion, is the most polished and well presented widget directory out there.

I had no problems finding the Blidget tool, which is located prominently on the Widgetbox home page. One very minor point that I appreciated � although I wasn�t logged in when I launched the tool, it didn�t direct me immediately to the login page. It let me build my widget, and THEN allowed me to login. Little things like this can make a big difference in adoption.

Read the whole thing, then pop over to WidgetBox and check it out.