Online Media Cultist

There’s lots of chatter and buzzy buzz about widgets these days, so it’s easy to forget that most regular folk have no earthly idea what they are. For our purposes, we’re actually talking about what Wikipedia terms as “web widgets,” defined as “a third party item that can be embedded in a web page.”

Because of the explosion of regular people publishing billions of pages in the form of blogs and other websites, and particularly the crazy growth of social networking profiles (which are really pre-created web pages that get filled in with information and media provided by the user) on sites like MySpace, the widget industry was born.

So widgets are “extra stuff” that get installed (via simple copy-and-pasting of code into a web page template) on web pages. The question I always think about when I see a widget is: who is the widget for? Is it for a public-facing audience i.e. people visiting that web page or MySpace profile, or is it predominantly there to serve information to the person who installed it?

As a web publisher, it’s important to recognize the difference and utilize a website’s limited real estate, as GigaOM alludes to in a piece entitled “Widget Mania run amok?”

Read/WriteWeb runs down a list of widget examples, and notes the new popularity of “widget commerce,” such as Auction Ads, which allows you to dynamically get updates on selected eBay auctions. I’d argue that this is a good example of a useful widget for the person who installs the widget, but very likely would only appear to be clutter to anyone else. Therefore, it’s a great idea to add this kind of widget to a Netvibes or My Yahoo page (i.e. web pages designed for personal consumption only), but not to a blog, with perhaps the rare exception of one that focuses on eBay auctions or e-commerce.

Personally, I think that with widgets, less is more. MyBlogLog is an ideal widget for blogs, I love to argue, because they serve multiple audiences well. The web publisher gets to see who is visiting his or her site, MyBlogLog members get to have their profile picture show up around the web (which fosters networking and connections), and community is promoted among bloggers and readers with similar interests.

And I also run FeedBurner’s widget, which shows how many RSS readers Online Media Cultist has on any particular day, mostly because I’m a stats junkie!