Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Be Careful with those Gadgets!

As some of you know, I've been running a few experiments with a variety of Google Gadgets, and others widgets, on this blog and others.

Blogger in Draft allows access to a host of gadgets for use on your blog and for the most part, many could be useful (depending on your content and target audience).

It's important to realize that many of the gadgets are produced by independent sources and I learned a quick (maybe obvious) lesson this past week.

There was a pretty cool looking gadget that provided direct links to almost all of the TV network full length online videos.  I was actually looking at it more as a shortcut for myself (especially for when I forget to set the DVR for 24 :).

After having it on THIS blog for about a day, I decided I'd click on the provided link to 'vote' for it as cool, as the author requested.

Instead of a 'voting platform', I was presented with a store selling a variety of drug paraphernalia.

Not exactly the kid of stuff we talk about here (or anywhere else).

Lesson learned.

Before you launch a gadget, test it.  See where it goes and what it does .... and check back occasionally.
The economy may lend itself to people doing some pretty weird things.

There's a few bad boys in that space ..... like anywhere else.