made this daft Christmas countdown timer last year thought I’d better get with the times and add some embeddable goodness courtesy of Gigya. This allows you to take it and put it on your site with only a few clicks. The ‘Gigya-iastion’ process is very simple, create your flash movie, pass it through the Gigya site and it spits out an embed tag at the end. Paste it into your blog (like I did below) and hey presto, a little tab appears (bottom right) allowing you to post it to all sorts of social networks and blogging sites. ClearSpring also provide a similar service. Both provide tracking. Both allow non-commercial applications to use it for free. However, both don’t allow for different languages and both don’t acknowledge local social networks. It’s just the biggies for now.

Give it a try now, it won’t bite. You don’t have to have a blog to see how it works!

Google and various other ad technology providers also provide sharable ads. The idea being then ads are created more as ‘content’ and therefore have a value to their target audience. Said audience can then choose to shere the ‘content’ on their own site. In reality, the ‘ad’ has to be an ad FOR the embeddable content, so in the end, the thing you were advertising in the first place tends to bet pushed to the back of the queue. Still, the principle is there. Check out Google’s Gadget Ads or Pointroll’s (Clearspring enabled) Widget Ads.

Of course, it should go without saying that it’s good practice to make content embeddable whenever possible. However, it can all seem a bit overwhelming sometimes. There is a simple way though. Visit AddThis, create a free account, choose you button style and it too generates a small bit of code. Simply paste it into your page and it allows the page link to be posted to all kinds of blogs. Bit crude but it works… like so…

This one opens a selection window…

This one is even cuter with a dropdown panel…

Now there’s no excuse for not sharing! Oh how my junior school teacher would be proud to hear me say that!