"The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry". That is really all I can say with regards to our promise to talk to you.

Like an uncomfortable silence at a party, starting the conversation back up can be awkward. So we'll just dive into new topics and pretend we never lost touch.

Taking it to the streets... Besides creating an enterprise-wide, centrally-developed and maintained approach to search (that reminds me that I should write a post about what we've accomplished of late just in the search space!) we have also begun delving into other centrally managed services being pushed out in a platform agnostic way.

Examples? Widgets! iPhone Apps! We're now working on taking the concepts of search, content aggregation and multichannel distribution out to a broader audience and additional destinations.

There is no denying that we're working from more places and more devices then ever before. There is no doubt that we're replacing our old habits of carrying around business magazines and visiting favorite publications homepage's several times a day with a more convenient all-about-me approach to information. We have personalized home pages (iGoogle, NetVibes,etc) , widget-based desktops, email and SMS alerts, RSS readers, social networks for our peers to spoon feed us important industry info and mobile phones where making a phone call seems like an after-thought feature compared to its internet and email capabilities...

This isn't new. You don't need (or likely want!) me to tell you all this, but it let's me be more dramatic in introducing some new efforts around here.

After lots of experimenting and evaluation we've decided that for us, delivery channels like this are part of our default feature set. We've also decided that reinventing them locally is not a good spend of intellect. The features we need have been developed by many partners and we consider most of them to be "commoditized". As much as 95% of the complexity of multichannel, multi-platform delivery with specialized reporting and whiz-bang behavior has already been put into libraries of code and fancy user-friendly (as opposed to developer-friendly) interfaces.

After a fun vendor evaluation we decided that we were going to work with NewsGator and their Social Widgets product to meet our own evolving widget creation and tracking needs. We're working at an enterprise level to create and roll out a business-centric focus to the features and opportunities made available in the new world of take-it-with me content and data. We'll be releasing many widgets with many of our publications over the next few months; some will be simple newsreaders or video players, where others will expose internal data assets in innovative ways.

Our first widget to be released into the wild is one for our flagship publication in the US B2B entertainment space -- Variety.com. Have a peek and let us know what you think:
http://www.variety.com/widget

As part of the same effort, we've worked with NewsGator to generate an iPhone version with similar functionality that is razzle-dazzled for the Apple-crew. That one can be seen here:
http://www.variety.com/iPhone

It is a free app, so if you are one of the lucky millions to have convinced your boss or your spouse that you should have one, check it out and let us know how we did.

We are going to continue to extend, expand, and enhance these widgets and the iPhone app in an iterative fashion and we'll be building many more. If you have something you'd like to see from us that you could take on the road or the desktop with you, please, let us know!

I'll also post the official press releases as we do these things, so that you can read it straight from the mouths of the marketeers as opposed to my rambling version of how the earth came to be...