MediaVidea

Widgets: Good or bad?

First up, a short definition of widgets:

Widgets are small pieces of software that can be ported easily. This would include plugins for blog software such as WordPress or Drupal, modules that can be plugged into popular "start pages" such as Netvibes, PageFlakes or Live.com, desktop widgets such as Yahoo Widgets or Mac dashboard widgets and, as demonstrated above, browser extensions.

There are some who are fidgety about widgets.

Reasoning that widgets will make web pages load slowly and will confuse readers, most of whom come to a page just to read, Valleywag defines Widgets as,

A widget is an affiliate marketing program, no more, no less.

Then there are some who are bullish.

Nick Wilson claims to have coined the idea of linkbaiting in 2005.

Now a contributing writer at Searchengineland, Nick Wilson says that 2007 will be the year of Widget bait, where you build fancy Firefox extensions to keep the reader in the fold.

Nick Wilson was at the Performancing Blog Ad Network, which was one of the first to get into the Widget Act , with the Performancing Blog Editor Firefox extension.

As of now, Nick Wilson’s writeup on Widget being the trend of 2007 is a good linkbait (writing articles to attract links – for example, controversial stuff), nothing else.

We keep moving around in circles.

Imagine a world where 100 million blogs have 100 million widgets.

posted by Pramit Singh @ 10:50 AM