Following on from my two recent widget posts, the crazy little web gadgets are in the new again.

TechCrunch has a post about Attack of the Advertising Widgets, of which the post itself is of the usual standard, but the comments provide the most interesting aspect with many people saying that widget advertising will be big news if they start to add value in terms of functionality, as opposed to standard banners which do nothing but try to get you to click.

"the key to these widgets will the the ability to provide dynamic information. as you change your prices, sales, promotions, the ad can dynamically show those changes.
a natural progression for adsense type technology." - KR

"lain text ads are already focused and less spammy than banners used to be but widgets can actually serve a purpose for the users. I would prefer a widget over a regular ad any day." Lior Haner

Whilst over at his blog Niall Kennedy posts about how Google are aiming to add widget space to their bidding system so that users can choose to have ad widgets embedded in the page as opposed to text or banner content.  This could be a big move for widgets by itself, but for me it just follows the same approach as with adwords etc. 

The really big move would be to forget distribution altogether, and allow users to choose what to spread virally. 

But we all need to take small steps I guess and these are definitely in the right direction.

Howard
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