Answers.com released a new widget for bloggers today called AnswerTips.

Site owners drop a <script> block into their page and then whenever a visitor double-clicks a piece of text a bubble with information opens up.

Try it out right now. Double click on any text.

“AnswerTips are small information bubbles that define any word when double-clicked. An AnswerTips-enabled site or blog means visitors get fast facts on 4 million topics provided by Answers.com when they double-click on any word, without opening a new browser or following outbound links. AnswerTips deliver instant definitions, explanations and facts including biographies, tech terms, geography, pop culture and much more.”

I did a quick hallway test and reactions were positive but the bubble tips are unexpected. I’m not sure how many users actually double-click on text, rather than click-and-swipe to highlight. Thoughts?

I’m a constant clicker-double-clicker to highlight text to copy into the clipboard and the bubble does not interfere with that process. Clicking back on the page closes the bubble, which is nice.

If you create music, BlastMyMusic.com has created a new Flash based widget for selling your tunes.

As the band, you create a profile on the BlastMyMusic.com website, upload your tracks, then drop the widget into your website, blog, myspace, facebook, etc.

Purchased music is DRM free MP3’s.

ClockLink provides embeddable Flash clocks.

Digital, analog, themed, you name it.

It’s nice to be able to give my brain a rest and work with a good old fashion widget. No email required, no account to create and a simple config.

A relatively useless widget, but whatever. Good for some bling I guess.

Embeddable Flash based widget to display your LinkedIn profile.

Amazon affiliates can now embed an “aStore” widget (iFrame) store within a web page.

The embedded store is fairly wide and there does not appear to be options for changing the width, so many will have to create unique pages or link off-site to the Amazon hosted page.

Here’s our Widgetoko aStore.

Speaking of yourminis.com, yesterday we got a bit of inside info…

“We [yourminis.com] are working on a big release right now that will include public APIs, desktop widgets (leveraging the Apollo platform), and a redesign of the yourminis site and community….stay tuned! :)”

… excellent.

The Apollo platform is being developed by Adobe Labs and from what I can tell seems like next gen Flash, but runs on the desktop (OSX & Win) like an operating system. More Apollo Q&A.

The yourminis “public API” certainly caught my attention as well. Maybe a little “build your own” widget kit? Who knows, but they got me wanting more.

An interesting change in the widget space recently is the ability to ‘export’ widgets from the dashboard sites and drop into your blog. About a month ago the personalized dashboard service yourminis.com pushed out functionally for users to export their widgets (Flash based) and embed into their “online identities” including social site like myspace and Facebook, your blog or any other website.

To export a yourminis widget, mouse-over the widget and a “copy me” link should appear in the top-right corner.

Yesterday we used a yourminis.com widget to display a Yahoo!pipes mashup called YouTunes.

The other day Yahoo! released “pipes“. A drag and drop interface which allows you to combine several feeds into one, using results from the first to manipulate (filter, sort, count, etc.) results from the second (and so on).

Initial impressions of the user interface blew me away. At first I thought pipes was Flash based, but it’s all AJAX. Frick’n brilliant. The whole AJAX based drag/drag stretchy/shrinky connection points is a first for me.

That said, it does take some brain power to figure out how this machine works. At the moment there is little to no documentation, few tutorials and some of the fundamental functionality like filtering by Dates does not work (yet). The forums do seem pretty active with useful tips.

The service reminds me of database query generators.

With all this talk of generating custom feeds from data where no feed exists, and now piping them all into Yahoo! to perform data manipulation, things are getting exciting.

For instance, Nick Bradbury (HomeSite, TopStyle & FeedDemon) created a demonstration pipe which gets the iTunes Top 10 feed, pushes those results into a YouTube search, which returns an RSS feed of Videos for each Top 10 track. Très cool.

Now what? How about adding the new YouTunes feed to a yourminis.com YouTube video widget, plopping onto your blog and mashing up the place.

Adding the Criteo AutoRoll widget to your blog will display links to other blogs your readers should like. Kind of like how Google Adsense works, but displays links to relevant blogs instead of advertising. AutoRoll requires sign-up and simple size/color configuration.

Criteo gets my vote for simply being based in Paris, France. J’aime Paris.

User comments from our previous post
“Create an RSS feed from any website data” pointed out a couple other options.

1. openkapow. Download and install their RoboMaker software to create REST, RSS, ATOM or HTML service feeds from just about any source that has a URL.

openkapow almost lost me on step one “Download and Install RoboMaker” (No Mac version available), and then again after I noticed it was a 106 MB file (eek!), but I pushed through. After installing, my first impression is ‘complicated‘. openkapow seems incredibly powerful, but it’s going to take some work to go through the tutorials and learn your way up to making a REST service or even consuming a simple feed.

2. FeedYes. Point the service at a URL and it tries to figure out if there’s any structured data on the page. Seems to work well with my initial tests, but the user interface could use a bit of polishing.

Out of the four so far (Feed43, Dapper, openkapow, FeedYes) my vote for straight up easiest to use with some options is Dapper; completely web based, no problems with reliability and hopefully any of the UI awkwardness of the initial releases will improve with age.

Hope this helps.