We got a press release from Simon & Schuster last week about the new video widget developed by Muse Storm for S&S’s BookVideos.tv program. Basically, you can either stick the widget on your computer desktop, or on your blog, and it updates twice a week with new interviews with S&S authors. I watched a few of the interviews, and as infomercials go, they’re well-done; still, though I understand that it’s money that sets these things in motion, I’d love to see similar projects that aren’t tied to particular publishing conglomerates. Like Writers Revealed or, we should be so lucky, Robert Birnbaum’s Identity Theory interviews, in video.
I also heard from SharedBook.com, which wanted to let me know that their Blog2Print widget, mentioned here a few weeks back, has already been modified to incorporate early feedback. Basically, then, it sounds from the press release like they’ve dealt with some formatting issues in the widget, which enables users to prepare blog content for publication, including better handling of embedded photos.