Widgetbox, one of the web’s largest widget creation and distribution platforms, is launching a new blog network and becoming a destination site in the process.
Widgetbox’s homepage will now feature 29 blog channels ranging from parenting to technology. Each channel will include a lists of the most active stories in the network, as well as a leaderboard rewarding the most prolific and popular writers. Leaderboards use a normalized acceleration algorithm to ensure that content from both large and smaller blogs will appear regularly.
To become part of the blog network, a blog owner will need to embed one of the 29 channel-specific widgets created by Widgetbox. Each widget will display the same leaderboard content as the Widgetbox homepage, which allows users to browse through a network’s top blogs without having to frequently return to the Widgetbox site. The company hopes that this will give member blogs an increase in traffic, while giving them an incentive to produce high quality material so that they might reap the benefits of appearing on the leaderboard.
Up until this point, Widgetbox has been primarily involved with creating and distributing widgets across a wide range of social networks and blogs. The site claims an impressive 462 million monthly widget impressions, a large portion of which is driven by very popular mini-RSS feeds the site calls “blidgets”.
Widgetbox may initially have some trouble driving members to join their new blog network – there are already a number of well established networks that could conceivably drive more traffic. But if the site can leverage the massive userbase held by its widgets (perhaps using unobtrusive system wide messages), it could see very rapid growth.
