We’ve been talking about it for a couple weeks, and now it’s finally here: The ReadBurner Top Stories Widget! It allows you to display the most shared stories from a given source by copying and pasting some code to your own web site. By using our wizard, you can customize the number of stories, time span, and size of the widget as well.

For example, let’s say you wanted to create a widget that is 200 pixels wide and shows the 5 most shared stories from The Inquisitr over the past 30 days. Here’s what that would look like:

You can also see the widget live on a few sites already, including louisgray.com, scribkin, and jeffisageek.

We think the widget makes a lot of sense for publishers for a few reasons. First, since we believe sharing is the ultimate endorsement of content, displaying the “most shared” stories on your site is a great way to link readers to your best stories. Second, we think displaying those stories will get you more intrasite traffic, as readers click the headlines to view the stories displaying in your widget. Finally, we think the widget can improve your share counts, as more people become exposed to the ReadBurner concept and the impact that sharing stories on Google Reader, News Gator, or Netvibes (with other services coming soon!) has on filtering the best content.

Also, while not explicitly the goal of the widget, we’d love to see some interesting mashups as people create widgets for their favorite sites to create custom ways to read the news – for example, setting up a page that shows the most shared stories from the past week from your favorite dozen blogs. Since the widgets can be copied and pasted anywhere, this is totally possible.

There are more features planned for the widget, including custom design options and stat tracking. Definitely let us know what would make it more appealing for you to use as a publisher, or if there are other options you’d like to see just as an end user that encounters the widget on blogs.

_adam

PS - As usual, thanks to Gary Bacon of PixelTalent for the design of the widget :)