What's a Widget?

It was a great day when I created my first website using FrontPage, and another great day when I put together my musical MySpace page. I had fun developing this blog and felt like I was really starting to “get with the new technology.” But then suddenly I needed to know SO many new things and I had a huge number of questions. What’s a Widget? What’s StumbleUpon? Delicious? BlinkList? Simpy? Digg?

There are so many names and icons on the many webpages I have viewed, how am I supposed to know what I want on my sites when I have no idea what they are? So, I did some research on some, and originally thought I would list them out with a brief description. BUT, then I found that most of the names I was looking up offered the same service. So, let’s look at widgets and social bookmarking, and I’ll talk about other applications another time.

First, I want to answer the BIG question – What’s a widget?
Pulling from my now-favorite websource, Wikipedia: 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.”
That definition must have been written by a techie. This part is better: “Widgets often take the form of on-screen tools (clocks, event countdowns, auction-tickers, stockmarket tickers, flight arrival information, daily weather, etc.)” Widgets are also known as modules, snippets, and plug-ins.

Blogger offers many widgets, and as you can see on the right-hand side, I have included two that seem applicable to this blog. There were MANY that looked fun, but I will use those for some other blogspace!

There are entire websites dedicated to providing widgets, and Apple has their own site for widgets appropriate for their products. I searched out several different widget terms including Distance Learning, and Education and found some great results. At widgetbox, you can even make your own widget that can be placed on your blog or website. (I will do that another time.) For your contemplation pleasure, I added the “Things to Ponder” widget at the bottom of this blog.
The main widget sites include:
http://widgets.yahoo.com/
http://www.widgetbox.com/
http://widgets.opera.com/


Social Bookmarking Sites: These sites are like giant search engines that let you bookmark your searches and the sites people like best. They let people rate the sites and then highlight those that are most popular. They allow you to access and share your bookmarks from any computer. For each of them I did a search for “Distance Learning”, the results are listed next to their name.
BlinkList:3968
Digg: 3
Reddit: 40
Simpy: 23,280 (this one included anything you could learn online. The top listings included several guitar lessons - which is neither here nor there, just interesting to me.)
Stumble: Didn’t give an exact number of listings but was approximately 65-70

Honestly, there are so many widgets, and countless sites with social bookmarking it is almost information overload. Nonetheless, there is some real value in these services. In the near future I will be using a social bookmarking site on a project with my team at work. As for widgets – I may just make my own soon!

Stay Tuned!
Teri