What is a Widget?

Based on photo entitled "Gear" from Flattop341's Flickr Industrial Set

If you've been following my widgets category, you know that I'm working on a screencast and have been researching and playing with widgets.

For the script, before jumping into the how-to of widgets, the screencast will give some context, of course.  It will explain the problem that a widget may solve for a nonprofit blog, some examples of nonprofit blogs using them, and oh yeah, answer the age old question "What is a Widget?"

Since this is a movie or visual, it has to be explained in a visual way. This is both the hard and fun part of making web videos.

What is a Widget?

My first stop for definitions is the (online) dictionary.   The term first appeared in 1924 as a variation on the word gadget.  The definition:

"A small mechanical device, as a knob or switch, esp. one whose name is not known or cannot be recalled." 

Mechanical factories of the 1920s makes me think of Metropolis and (I got distracted ... so I go search for some music for the soundtrack.)

According to wikipedia, The earliest known occurrence of the word "widget" is in Beggar on Horseback (1924), a comedy play written by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly.

The hero of this play is a struggling composer who must choose between creating music that stimulates his soul (but earns no money) or earning a living by accepting a soul-deadening job in a factory that makes "widgets". The text of the play intentionally refrains from revealing what "widgets" are; clearly, they represent any purely mercantile commodity that has no artistic or spiritual value.

Wikipedia's definition of widget  also points to some popular, cultural, and technical, including: 

• A comic book character and copyrighted image

• There are beer widgets that create foamy heads in a canned beer, with the first one patented by Guiness

• A reference to gadget in the Delta Airlines Logo

What we're talking about are web widgets and the definition is:

A Web Widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate html-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are akin to plugins or extensions in desktop applications. Other terms used to describe a Web Widget include Gadget, Badge, Module, Capsule, Snippet, Mini and Flake. Web Widgets often but not always use Adobe Flash or JavaScript programming languages.

Robin Good recently interviewed Marshall Kirkpatrick about Mash-ups and he asked Marshall to define widgets in the context of the conversation.

A Widget is a piece of code that enables a non-technical website publisher to pull in data and a display for that data from another website, so they can have, say, news ticker headlines or a personal horoscope, or local weather or an RSS feed.

What problem does a widget solve?

I went widget hunting to find the answers.  I've been asking nonprofit bloggers to tell me what they think, point me to examples on their blogs, and of course, I took a look at all the widgets in the various widget directories like Widgetbox (see Marshall's review here)

What I am looking at in the context of the screencast are these questions: 

• How can you use widgets to create a community or conversation around your blog?
• Are widgets useless foo foo or can they be used strategically to generate comments/discussion or attract new readers?
• What are a few good examples and how easy are they to install?
• What are the strategic points about deploying them?

Benefits and Considerations

Using widgets is not yet a common practice on nonprofit blogs and folks are still experimenting and learning.    Still, there are benefits:

-Easy to use, don't need technical skills
-Can help you extend or enhance the conversation on your blog
-Can help you "listen" by gathering feedback and other information from your blog readers
-Can help you easily link to other sites, content, or individuals
-Can help make your blog more "findable"
-They are lots of fun

Before you go hog wild on widgetbox and install every widget known to mankind, consider the following:

-If most of your readers are following you via blog readers, they may not "pop" out of their reader to visit your browser.
-On the other hand, many blogs end up being positioned higher in search engine searches, so there must be some blogs that are being discovered via the browser and not a reader.  So, perhaps widgets should be designed to reach first-timers or new readers.  Consider them as a strategy for point of entry. You need to know from where your audience is coming to your blog.
-Consider your audience when you select a particular widget.  If you're a podcaster and your audience is likely to a microphone installed on their computer, than those message widgets might make sense.
-The use of widget must be linked to the topic, content, or purpose of your blog.  For example, linking a poll to a post on the topic.

The examples so far:

Audience Feedback/Organizational Listening
    - Message/Comments - as seen on Life Kludger
    -A survey/Poll as seen on the Bamboo Project

Conversation, Interaction, and Commenting
   -Using meebo or chat on a blog like Nancy White or Confessions of an IT Director
   -Use of widget that streams comments on the side bar (NTEN) and strategy
   -Fundraising via blog (some pointers here and here) - not sure if I can find an actual example. 

Streaming Headlines or Other Content  from other Blogs or Links
    -RSS widgets as seen on AFP Blog
    -Use of Calendar or event information
    -Sites that link or who links to me as seen on the Nonprofit Consultant Blog

So, Nancy White, does this answer your question?

Comments

[elie wood]

hello lovely word
I'm a human who dream about sheep magnetiks
http://visuel.art.free.fr/0vizuel/first.php
Que vont ils dire ?