If you haven't noticed yet, NewsGator loves to partner with high quality content providers, as well as companies that enhance and extend our product offerings to our clients (such as mSpoke or AideRSS). 

Today we announce a partnership with National Geographic to create, host and track several dynamic widgets, including an interactive photo puzzle widget that users spend, on average, several minutes interacting with. 

What's most novel about this partnership is that it transcends the "traditional" widget syndication model (users add widgets to start pages or social networking sites), by adding another dimension of distribution: allowing third parties to co-brand the widget and feature it on their own sites.  So far, major media sits like Tampa Bay Online and the Dayton Daily News have already picked up these dynamic, co-branded widgets.

The NewsGator-hosted, National Geographic widgets include: "OurShot," a widget in which photo editors highlight recent exceptional work and "YourShot," through which end users can contribute photos in the hopes of being featured in the magazine.  The cool thing about the YourShot widget is that each day it features different finalists' photos in the form of a puzzle, which can be co-branded by third parties and featured on their sites for free.  (And it's incredibly easy to add, too: third parties can add the puzzle widget by using a single URL to submit their logo and RSS feed info.)

And we already have numbers to back up the effectiveness of this partnership!  In the first 30 days of the launch, the widget was syndicated to over 23 media sites not affiliated with National Geographic, extending the potential reach of the National Geographic branded widget to over 3 million new users!

Rob Covey, managing editor and creative director of National Geographic explains that, "with the puzzle widget, we have really been able to extend our brand through co-branding, now allowing our partner sites to get up and running with the widget smoothly and efficiently [and at no cost] through a single URL."

And Jeff Nolan, VP of NewsGator Consumer and Media Services, furthers that National Geographic is just the latest in a growing list of media customers who are, "defining a new generation of media experience based on dynamic content syndication and user interaction that results in a more engaged audience."  The engagement that these interactive, co-branded widgets foster is clearly key to their ability to connect with customers.

You can grab this widget here!