Claiming to be a first for UK regional media, the what’s on widgets, available at www.soglos.com/widgets, are dynamically updated on a continual basis to show a carefully-selected choice of upcoming Gloucestershire arts, entertainment and leisure events, while users can also interact with the widgets – choosing to see events taking place over a specific date range.
Widgets are available for Gloucestershire as a whole, as well as for the county’s six main areas specifically: Cheltenham, the Cotswolds, the Forest of Dean, Gloucester, Stroud and Tewkesbury.
The widgets were developed as a direct result of repeated demand to use the online magazine’s content:
“We developed the widgets after being contacted by a host of local organisations, including hotels, restaurants and attractions in particular, who expressed an interest in using SoGlos.com’s events-specific editorial content to promote tourism in Gloucestershire. The new widgets allow us to share SoGlos.com’s content in a controlled and measurable way,” said SoGlos.com deputy editor James Fryer.
The SoGlos.com widgets are being shared and distributed through the Clearspring platform – also favoured by the Telegraph – allowing users to easily add a widget to their own website or blog, and a host of social media websites including Facebook, Twitter and iGoogle.
It took six months to make the widgets possible, as the online magazine’s bespoke CMS underwent a complete overhaul to recognise and handle event data more intelligently:
“Our back office has been improved to recognise and interpret event information, and can now process and present this in a number of ways – catering for readers’ interests by area, date and subject, for example. This means we’ll now be able to make the online magazine much more dynamic – the new widgets are a great example of this, as well as being a very innovative new addition to SoGlos.com,” Fryer continued.
As part of today’s launch readers have also been provided with a new dynamic events calendar, available at www.soglos.com/gloucestershire-events, which is completely bespoke to SoGlos.com and powers the new widgets.
Although firmly rooted in Gloucestershire, the online magazine’s founders are now keener than ever to see the model fulfil its potential in other areas of the UK.
“Over the last two and half years we have continually improved and refined SoGlos.com as an online magazine model, and the new widgets in particular would work well in other areas of the UK – from SoEdinburgh.com to SoBirmingham.com,” Fryer said.
SoGlos.com predicts its new widgets will be embedded on hundreds of websites by the end of 2009, and thousands of websites moving into the year 2010 – and, it continues, further cementing its position as Gloucestershire’s most popular guide to arts, entertainment and leisure.
About SoGlos.com
SoGlos.com says: “SoGlos.com is an independent online publication and was launched in 2007 by journalists Michelle Byrne and James Fryer. The online magazine is updated daily with professional editorial across dedicated sections ranging from Restaurants and Theatre & Comedy to Art & Culture and Music. SoGlos.com currently attracts 67,000+ individual readers every month, in addition to sending a weekly email newsletter to 13,000+ subscribers. SoGlos.com’s revenue streams include the sale of display advertising, enhanced venue listings and enhanced event listings. Readers are not charged to access any content. SoGlos.com hit the headlines in July 2008 for its launch of a bespoke Google-powered Gloucestershire Interactive Map, coinciding with its first birthday. See http://www.soglos.com/gloucestershire-map.”
