We are beta testing a new version of our popular Editor’s Desk widget management application.

Managing the content of a widget has always been a strong point of our hosted service, with not only post level control over RSS feeds but also the ability to create search feeds that scour a broad range of sources and pre-bundled content feeds.

One of the more powerful aspects of the content management tool is the ability to aggregate a large number of feeds and control the display. The Enterprise Irregulars widget that runs in my sidebar pulls together 40 different feeds from the EI member sites, and then throws in Summize feeds for “Enterprise Irregulars” and “enterprise software” for good measure.

The widget displays all of these content sources in an orderly fashion, cycling 1 post item per feed per 8 slots, to ensure that high frequency blogs don’t dominate the presentation. This is the kind of control you get using our widget service, as well as the ability to pull out post items or make them “sticky” to stay in view up at the top of the widget.

The ability to syndicate content is a powerful capability that widgets provide. The Enterprise Irregulars widget gets about 22k impressions a month here but across the 30+ sites that have picked up this widget there is another 80k impressions per month that roll up. What that means is that I’m generating 100,000 widget impressions (analogous to a pageview) per month, extending the EI brand, and achieve a consistent 2-3% clickthrough rate on the content.

There is much more in this updated service, sign up and give it a try.