We’re working with some pretty interesting clients, and our work on WineLog is anything but boring. Still, we know how easy it is to get burned out on “work”. For that reason, Kim and I are always on the look out for quick, fun projects we can use to keep the energy level up in our office.

After reading a little blurb somewhere about the recent Google Gadget competition, Kim and I brainstormed for gadget ideas. We had never created a Google gadget (or any other homepage widget) before, and thought the format would be good for our goal of finding a simple, fun side project to work on.

We tried to focus on things that would be (1) fun, (2) different, and (3) easy to complete in one week or so. Among some other great ideas, we had this: “A magic 8-ball game where other users answer your questions.” We did a quick search and didn’t find anything like it out there, registered the domain Interactive8Ball.com, and set to work.

It was soon after registering the domain that we found the official rules page for the Google Gadget Awards competition and ran into a couple snags. First, the rules page uses an 8-ball gadget as an example. That’s good because it means we’re on the right page, bad because we’d probably seem unoriginal no matter how much we change the 8-ball formula. The second snag was that entrants needed to be university students. Technically, I think we just needed a .edu email address. Kim just graduated this past spring and we considered entering under her name, but decided against it. If we did end up winning one of the prizes, I didn’t want to deal with the scandal of entering under false pretenses and trying to steal money from starving college students.

So no competition. But here is the gadget we would have entered:

Let us know what you think.