Panels

You'll have noticed a small in text blue icon next to companies mentioned in the posts. Rolling over the icon opens up a "panel" that displays additional information about the organization.  

“Panels” is a new consumer information network that instantly gives users the most sought after information about any organization, brand, or advertisement – in a standardized, consistent, and predictable format called a “Panel.” Panels can appear on any internet ad, blog, social profile page, email signature, URL, brand name, and more. These “Panels” automatically deliver contextually relevant and in‐depth information to users about any entity, at any time, from numerous data sources.
Users get this information for free without diverting them from their web location and without requiring any effort on their part. Panels’ categories are organized as tabs across the top of the panel and so far the following are available;

“About”  - Basic company and contact info, URL, logo, and summary
“Site”  - A full preview of the home page, stats, tags and other goodies about the actual web site/blog
“Map”  - Beginning with Google Maps, and others to follow, a place for geographic data
“News”  - Headlines, Blog posts, News, Press Releases and more from a variety of sources
“Jobs”  - Employment listings across numerous providers such as Monster and SimplyHired
“Financial”  - If a public company, real-time info and quotes appear in several sub-categories

Coming Soon over the next few weeks are “Reviews” and “Shop” 

Site Search - Lastly, notice in the lower left hard corner of the panels, you can easily search just the target site right from here, with results opening up in a new window or tab. 

Panels appear for any company or organization ranging from the biggest public companies such as Apple, Ford, AT&T, or WalMart to up and coming startups such as WebDiet (launched at Demo Fall 08 ) and Yammer (launched at TechCrunch50)

Panels make any blog significantly more useful for readers and more successful for the publisher/blogger/website owner because;

Users will stay on the page because they can get deep information via panels and,
Clicks on links - including ads - will dramatically increase   

More information on panels is available here. If you'd like to test out panels on you blog - send an email to me at colincrawford@gmail.com - implementation is simple.