Links to the Marriage Calculator

What's success at an Internet start up company? When something from your site gets written about by lots of folks. If that's the case, the marriage calculator has hit a sweet spot.

Beyond links to a number of smaller blogs and web sites for television stations and newspapers, there are some pretty big dogs in the links.

If you haven't seen it, here are a few of the folks who have written about the calculator, which was put together for us by University of Pennsylvania's Betsey Stevenson, a Wharton assistant professor of business and economic.

Stevenson used statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau to help us with the marriage calculator, which can show you how many people who married at your same age with your same education level are now divorced. The widget also uses those figures to project five years from now how many more folks in your group will be divorced.

Here are some of the blogs and stories that have been written about the widget:

The New York Times
The Baltimore Sun
AOL
UPI
Marketwatch

Widget 101: What's a Widget? How Does it Work?

Earlier this week, I updated my facebook status with a note about putting the finishing status on a widget for the web site. A few moments later, a friend e-mailed this question: "What's a widget?"

A widget is a web-based tool that allows you to enter information into a database and get something in return. If you're buying an airline ticket, for instance, you're entering the information parameters -- the time frame in which you want to fly -- into a database, which in turn spits out the tickets that are available in that time frame for the area you want to visit.

We've been working with Betsey Stevenson, an associate professor of business and public policy at Wharton, who used U.S. Census information to put together a database. We call it The Marriage Calculator. The user answers some basic questions: the age they were at the time of their marriage, their education level and -- if you're a woman -- the number of children you have, and the database shares two statistics:

1. The number of people with similar backgrounds who got married and are now divorced.

2. The number of people like you who are likely to be divorced in five years. This uses historical Census data to predict what will happen in the future.

My last year in newspapers, I spent a lot of time managing database projects -- including about property values that got so much traffic it shut us down for a short time. While my boss wasn't exactly happy, I considered that a user success, if not a career-enhancing one.

The point of this widget is similar. Interest, traffic and users who keep coming back.