The year of the Web Widget
Widgets are all the rage this year. Do you know what a web widget is? Wikipedia.org gives the following definition: 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 plug-ins or extensions in desktop applications. Other terms used to describe a web widget include gadget, badge, module, capsule, snippet, mini and flake.
Hopefully I haven’t lost you yet, because we are getting to the good part! David Berkowitz wrote a great entry in his blog today on Web Widget Optimization, which starts out …”If Rene Descartes were alive today, rather than saying “Je pense, donc je suis” (“I think, therefore I am”), he might say, “Il est, donc j’optimise” (“It is, therefore I optimize”). By that same reasoning, if Monsieur Descartes were alive today, instead of emerging as both the Father of Modern Philosophy and the Father of Modern Mathematics, he’d be trying to figure out how to optimize Web widgets — the next frontier of search engine optimization”.
David may need a little help with his French, but he’s right about widgets. Widgets are omnipresent and changing the rules of search engine optimization. We have multiple widgets on our blog and they are all very cool and useful tools. One of my favorite’s is the Lijit widget, that helps you search blogs for information. You may say “well Google can do that”, oui y non. Google has a search engine technology that gives credence and high rankings to the largest and most popular websites, but Lijit will help you find information from experts in their field. Who doesn’t want that kind of information! So, who can tell me how many widgets on our site?
July 18th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
Lee, thanks for the mention. We think searching what blogs an expert reads, what articles an expert bookmarks and all the online content that an expert publishes is very useful indeed. Glad that you see our value and hope you have fun checking out the awesome stats that we provide also!