Off The Cuff

The Widget Craze..Uh, What’s A Widget?

Posted by: From Arkansas in Just Stuff, News And More Stuff on Sep 19 2007

Welcome back!

For years, I heard and saw the word “widget” in all sorts of places. Frankly, when I first saw the word, I was thinking that it meant any little gadget that comes along that no one knows the name for it. When someone didn’t recall the name of the gadget, it became a widget. Everyone needed a new widget in their homes. Dad used to have tools that were usually widgets because he wanted it and sent me off to find it. I had no idea whatsoever what he wanted. Those were the days.

Nowadays, the word means a little image with a link, an advertisement, that you put on a website or blog that is clickable back to the original site. But that word always brings up a picture of that tool Dad wanted or that something-or-other that no one could remember the name of it. So, it was with a laugh, that I noticed that Google is now going to cash in on the “widget craze”. Seems they (whoever those “theys” are) are now calling them “interactive capsules” that you put on a website to give it more pizazz. (Is that like a pizza with more stuff on it??)

This is actually not a surprise. Those folks at Google have to be doing something that takes them away from updating our websites’ page rank which is quite overdue now. (That was a dig at Google. I love doing that.)

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