Tokyopop, a publisher of manga in the US, has widgets available to post on MySpace, FaceBook, blogs, and many other webpages.  I decided to try it out to see how it works.

Here’s the URL if you want to try it out yourself too:
http://www.tokyopop.com/life/features/1091471.html

This picture shows some of the webservices the widgets can be posted to:

This picture shows one of the widgets on my external blog:

I use Google’s Blogger service.  Posting the widget was very easy.  I clicked on the “grab it!” button, selected Blogger, and then entered my login information (probably not the safest thing to do — they could be phishing).  If you don’t want to give login info or if the webservice you use is not available, then they also provide a little script to cut-and-paste into the source code of your webpage.

Obviously these widgets are meant to be viral since you can post them to another page from where ever you encounter the widget.   Also, who knows what else this widget is doing.  I imagine it also takes tracking information.  Personally, I don’t find the widgets Tokyopop has available to be anything that I would want to put on my page, except for maybe the manga preview widget.  If they had a widget that showed their schedule of manga releases, then that is something I would definitely post because that would be useful to me and my readers.  I will leave this widget on my page for a couple of weeks.  Hopefully, I won’t get any backlash from folks out there who hate Tokyopop.