eHow Wins Mashable's "How To" Open Web Award Category

eHow.com won the Bloggers Choice for the "How To" category of the Mashable Open Web Awards! Rich Noguchi, community manager for eHow, announced the win this morning on the eHow Blog.

This comes on the heels of getting a bit of Television love from New York Fox Affiliate WNYW where eHow GM Greg Boudewijn along with eHow Food expert Bethany Frankel were both featured in a "How to Make Money from Home in a Tough Economy" news spot. How-To is an expanding category of content and to dominate for what are normally "Stop Words" is quite an achievement.

AddThis Social Bookmark Widget for Open Web Award

I have been a strong advocate of the AddThis widget to ease social bookmarking since I first spotted it in September of 2006 and did an emailed interview of co-founder Dom Vonarburg here at RealitySEO.

Since then, it has spread like wildfire to major media sites like Time.com, CBS, ABC and a long list of web publishers that needed a scalable way to do link building. As you can see from this blog, I use it here at the foot of every post.

For me, the single AddThis dropdown widget has always been preferable to what I've heard called "Iconistan" - where sites show a collection of up to a dozen social bookmarking site icons on every article page.

This single tiny social bookmarking widget allows visitors to any site where it is used to bookmark the landing page easily at up to 39 social bookmarking services.

Here is an example inline so you can view details by hovering as you read.



Since the beginning, AddThis has offered publishers new tools, like branding the popup window which results if users choose the "more" option on the dropdown, customization of the sites shown in that dropdown, and tracking for publishers of how many times the widget is used by visitors and for which bookmarking services.

AddThis has constantly added new services to the pop-up as they have become popular and this makes it easier on publishers to keep up with the ever-evolving world of social media. The single tool gives you access to 39 social media sites in a single widget and adds trackability.

AddThis is the perfect win-win - ease of access to social bookmarking sites for users and trackability and link building scalability for publishers. Recently AddThis was acquired by ClearSpring and those added resources and reach will no doubt allow improvement of the tool.

I was happy to see that AddThis has been nominated for the Mashable Open Web Awards and, as a big fan of widgets, I want to make it possible for readers to vote using the widget below. Simply enter your email address and you'll receive a follow-up email from Mashable to confirm your vote.