Finally I got a chance to do some programming!  I have worked the kinks out of my incredibly edibly basic early proof of concept of the widget functionality and have incorporated it into the live Bingo Card Creator site. 

You can see the distribution of the proof-of-concept widget at my most popular bingo cards page and the actual widget itself displayed on my stripped-down mock-up page.  Before you click there, let me warn you: it is boring as all heck.  I would like to say that is because I wanted cross-website compatibility, but mainly it is because I am not meeting Keith (my good friend and the CSS guy who will be assisting me a bit this month) until tomorrow and, independently, I have the artistic ability of paint.  Not MSPaint, no, just paint.

I also took out the embedded viral distribution for the proof of concept because a) its late and b) I’m lazy.

Hopefully this shows off why a small businessman would want to pay for this functionality.  Imagine that spread over a few dozen teacher blogs — it propagates itself, for no marginal cost whatsoever, spreads the content I spent so much time and money creating, and gets me new visitors and eventually customers at a bare fraction of the cost of CPC advertising… all the while allowing me to deepen my relationship with my core followers by giving them free stuff that they like.  That is a win-win-win. 

Now if I can just generalize it and make it possible to do without a few hours of Rails programming, I can start printing money hats.  Small, modest money hats to start with.