Principled Innovation LLC

CBS Evening News Google Gadget

September 7th, 2006

Watching Katie’s show the last two nights, it has been quite clear that she and her team are making a special effort to connect the TV viewing experience to the Web. Of course, we already knew that the CBS Evening News would be simulcast on the Web each night, and Katie is using the Web to solicit viewer suggestions for her sign-off. She’s writing a blog, which Brian Williams of the NBC Nightly News is doing as well. In each of the first two broadcasts, Katie has made at least three mentions of the CBS News website herself, which is at least two more than you usually expect to hear directly from the anchor during a 30-minute broadcast. So, they are already doing a fair bit to make the online connection as authentic as possible.

I have to confess, however, that I was quite surprised this morning when I opened Firefox and saw a prompt on my Google personalized homepage to add a CBS Evening News gadget. The gadget, which is pictured above, includes an embedded video player, feeds to headlines from the website, pictures of Katie and links to her blog and other resources. Neither ABC nor NBC have created Google gadgets for their evening news shows, and even the BBC, an early adopter of new media, doesn’t have a Google gadget as nice as this one.

What does this Google gadget mean? For most people, probably not that much. This little tool will not change anyone’s mind about watching the evening news. But I still find it interesting for two reasons. First, I do think that offering this gadget reflects a deeper understanding on the part of someone at CBS about what an important role Google plays in people’s day-to-day lives. Instead of following the lead of other news organizations by sharing only RSS feeds of top stories, CBS is delivering a much nicer microchunk of content, including video, that allows Google users to have their own personal CBS Evening News right on their desktops without having to surf anywhere, unless they want to do that. For me, the Google gadget makes the network’s Web strategy here that much smarter.

I also like this Google gadget because it should serve as a powerful reminder to associations that they too can offer their content in exactly the same way. Indeed, I’m surprised that no associations out there (at least not to my knowledge) have created Google gadgets to share information with their members. Anyone with the right programming skills can create a Google gadget using the company’s freely-available API, and I’m hard-pressed to believe that most associations cannot find someone to do the necessary work for them as a volunteer project. Indeed, the Google gadget may be the best way to expose association members to RSS feeds if they aren’t already familiar with them, because it won’t require the use of yet another desktop application to read them.

So, I give Katie and CBS full marks for getting this one very right, and I hope association leaders out there will pay attention to the possibilities here. All it requires is a bit of imagination!

Entry Filed under: Principled Innovation Blog, What's New?, Social Media, Innovation, Associations, Extreme Makeover, The Association Innovator