HVR Farewell: An Interactive Fall Lineup, Back to the Future Footwear
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Are widgets a fad or the future of online advertising?
General Discussion
You can't spend a day in the blogosphere these days without running into five or ten posts about widgets. (For illustrations, see http://www.videoactivereport.com/widgets.) Are people pumping these out on such an insane schedule because they work, or because everybody else is doing it -- and who wants to be left standing behind the curve? Seems to me they're worth doing so long as your targets agree. Your widget has to have long-term value, rather than be an amusing trifle that will wear out its welcome in a week or two. What do you think, widget lovers? How many do you use? And how long are you willing to spend trolling through widget sites looking through your thousands of options? |
Web Logs
What is a widget?
http://blog.snipperoo.com/2006/08/what_is_a_widge.html
One of things that bugs me about the "widget" craze is that everybody seems to have a different idea of what a widget is. Without a more precise language, everything is just hype about whatever new cool things are out there. Sure, cool new plug-in components are great. They have been great for at least 20 years and will continue to be great long after the current "widget" craze is long gone and forgotten. There's also a huge variety of types and places they can be used and precise language to talk about them and discriminate between different types and uses. If you want to get beyond the hype, take a history lesson and look at other technical words that have been subverted into nebulous hype categories, for example "push." Once the hype machine gets a hold of the word, everything remotely related gets lumped under the term and precision of meaning is lost. However, the ideas and techniques usually were important long before and long after the brief blip where the term was a hype buzzword.
The next big thing on the web could be "tacks" where a tack is anything which sticks widgets together. I don't see the use in inventing new terms or subverting old terms to lump anything recent into a hype-category except to create marketing buzz. I think it borders on dishonesty and confuses people. Precise language is an important part of working with technology and marketers and media should make an effort to use it.
Try out http://dack.com/web/bullshit.html and come up with the next great Internet innovation!