Widget an integral part of a blog

Do you remember that commercial where the mechanic says to the car owner; – Well, your bindle grinder needs to be replaced and your widget pump is dead?

That, of course, was techno-babble in its purest form.

Which takes directly to widgets. No, they are not car parts.

With the advent and shift to Web 2.0, blogs have become even more popular. One of the most popular free blogging software is WordPress, which has recently become widget ready. They are the driving force in community-driven content. Call it good or bad – it’s here. Blogs, user-created diaries of sorts, have no real governing body or standards. Take them for what you will – either informative, or nonsense. Find the right blog and it’s a holy grail to some.

A collection of blogs can be used to form a RSS feed that you can have delivered to your favorite RSS reader, webpage, or customized startup page.

The customized startup page that I am referring to is the one www.netvibes.com is offering, for example.

These webpages are created in segments, or populated with your own content. The page itself comes your way as a blank page, with divisions similar to desktop publishing techniques, where pages are divided into eighths, quarters, columns, headers and footers and so on.

It’s in these sections that you can drop widgets into the sections, and arrange them as you like.

So what is it?

A widget is a new Web 2.0 phenomenon. It’s a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) web page element that can offer anything from local weather forecasts to the latest Hollywood headlines. A popular location to view widgets is with the new Windows Vista, where you have a gadget, or widget toolbar, populated with an analog clock, weather, and desktop wallpaper galleries, etc.

As you can see from Windows Vista, widgets have evolved into not only a web page element, but an element of your operating system. And even of your daily computer life, actually.

Yahoo has developed software called Yahoo Widgets for this purpose. Although this is not designed for use in a web page, it is essentially the same concept.

There are thousands of widgets, and the general public are the designers.

Developers upload their widgets in a user-created gallery. All free of course.

Widgetbox.com focuses on widgets for blogs, and has thousands to choose from. These require some knowledge of HTML.

If you are curious, head over to Yahoo Widgets, and download the widget software, or visit www.netvibes.com. You can build a sample page in minutes and see what all the hype is all about.