The Widget - Revolutionary Distribution of Content

For those who do not know, a widget is a snippet of code and can be anything that can be embedded within a page of HTML, i.e. a web page. A widget adds some content to that page that is not static. Generally widgets are third party originated, though they can be home made. Widgets are also known as modules, and plug-ins.Applications can be integrated within a third party website by the placement of a small snippet of code. The code brings in ‘live’ content – advertisements, links, images – from a third party site without the web site owner having to update.

End users can utilize Web Widgets to enhance a number of web-based hosts, or drop targets. Categories of drop targets include social networks, blogs, wikis and personal homepages. Although end users primarily use Web Widgets to enhance their personal web experiences, or the web experiences of visitors to their personal sites, corporations can potentially use Web Widgets to improve their web sites using syndicated content and functionality from third party providers.

The use of web widgets has been increasingly proposed as a marketing channel that could replace the less effective targeted banner ads and take advantage of the viral distribution in social networks. This usage has been criticized as ineffective ^[1] on the basis that users of a social space are not mainly in a mindset receptive to information exposition but one of content creation..

With Widget Box I was able to create several widgets. One of them if from content on a very excellent site Web Strategy by Jeremiah. I also used Widget Box to create a widget from my RSS feed for inclusion on other sites as well.