The first time I heard anyone call widgets the “digital bling” was back in summer of 2006. Niall used it to explain widgets. Later Newsweek picked up on it and used it to explain to its main stream, non-geeky audience. And now Guy Kawasaki has started using this easy to understand description of widgets. Anyway the article about widgets on blogs takes a look at only one aspect of widgetization of the web.
I agree with DJI that blogs are not where the the widgets are not going to have big impact. There is a reason – most of the ones DJI cites – why you don’t see any widgets here on this blog.
Widgets that do work well on blogs – polling widgets, comment widgets and sometimes IM widgets, Flickr and Last.fm widgets they are all about enhancing the reader experience, not distracting from it. The real excitement of widgets in on personalized pages, mobiles and the desktops.
Valleywag has a widget rant as well, which does make some good points, and questions the MySpace specific business model.
Imagine a world of 100 million blogs and 100 million widgets.
http://mediavidea.blogspot.com/2007/01/widgets-good-or-bad.html
Slamming widgets because they distract from the content when put in blogs is like slamming TVs because they distract from driving when put in cars. But TVs belong in the home. And widgets belong in social networks.
I posted on this on the Lightspeed blog. Click on my name in this comment if you’d like to see more.
sorry, have to say that in this case VW is full of shite… widgets ain’t new, and they are quite important.
om, the widgets you’re using on your blog are great, and whether they’re visible bling or not i’d agree they add a lot to the reader experience.
throwing all widgets (and widget companies in monopoly ecosystems) under the bus is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
widgets — that is, embeddable application components — are useful shit. period.
i agree with the utility of widgets, but not everything works everywhere and i think that is part of the conversation that needs to happen. widgets netvibes=bliss. Too many widgets ala Fred Wilson’s blog = just too much