I took that photo of Marshall at the NTC in Seattle last year when I finally met him face-to-face! Anyway, there is a terrific video interview of Marshall and text transcript over at Master New Media where Marshall talks about Mashups.
I've been researching widgets recently and the last section of the interview covers that:
Marshall Kirkpatrick: I’ve been thinking about widgets, relative to mash ups, lately. Widgets are a tool with a silly name, but a powerful tool that I think will be used more and more in coming times, whereby portable data is syndicated from one source, from one site onto another site, in an easy way for consumers without technical knowledge. There’s big money and big innovation going on in the Widgetspace right now, believe it or not, and similarly I think that mash ups, as well, will be a case of innovation from the edges, with a silly name, coming on like gangbusters and ending up being a standard practice in the near-term future.
RG: What’s a Widget, Marshall?
Marshall Kirkpatrick: 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-
RG: ...an RSS feed...
Marshall Kirkpatrick: Any different variety of content from off-site displayed as a part of their site and updated automatically without having the technical knowledge to do that integration themselves other than through the use of this widget tool.
Also a link to the WidgetBox.
Beth, it's Master New Media.
Posted by: John | October 18, 2006 at 11:13 PM
The blogosphere is my copy editor!
Thanks, I'll fix it!
Posted by: Beth | October 19, 2006 at 05:48 AM