No, I won’t take you back to this 1990s animated television series. I am referring to Web widgets, A.K.A. modules, capsules, snippets, gadgets, badges, minis or flakes. Those of you who use iGoogle or Google Desktop, Flickr, YouTube, etc. are probably aware of what widgets are. Even the new Windows Vista Sidebar includes widgets. However, even amongst these users, I suspect many are not aware of how they work and what they can be used for.

Basically, a widget is a portable snippet of code that can be embedded within most web pages in order to provide non-static information. Early examples of widgets were the infamous counters you still see at the bottom of a webpage where you are told you are the 10 000th person to view the page (and you just won 1M$!). However, the most used widget is obviously the advertising banner you see on many sites.

Personally, I use widgets on my iGoogle page to gain access to my Gmail account, to be informed about Law.com news, to access my Bloglines account and to see my new favorites on Del.icio.us. However, what I prefer is to embed within my blog contents from other websites that I think might be of interest to my readers.

For example, I have created this ABA Techshow widget.  To place the ABA TECHSHOW blog widget on your blog or website, just insert this code:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowNetworking="all" allowScriptAccess="always" allowFullScreen="true" height="318" width="250" id="wiid_16941" align="middle" data="http://downloads.thespringbox.com/web/wrapper.php?file=ABA TECHSHOWblog.sbw"><param name="allowNetworking" value="all" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="movie" value="http://downloads.thespringbox.com/web/wrapper.php?file=ABA TECHSHOWblog.sbw" /><param name="flashvars" value="param=http://feeds.feedburner.com/ABATECHSHOWblog&param_style_borderColor=000000&param_style_brandUrl= http://downloads.thespringbox.com/hosted_content/images/fb0c832d47943cdb99ef666227a28391.gif&partner_id=0" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent" /><param name="bgColor" value="0x000000" /></object><div style="font:11px/12px arial;width:250px;"><a href="http://www.springwidgets.com/widgetize/16941/?param=http://feeds.feedburner.com/ABATECHSHOWblog&param_style_borderColor=000000&param_style_brandUrl= http://downloads.thespringbox.com/hosted_content/images/fb0c832d47943cdb99ef666227a28391.gif&partner_id=0&width=250&height=318" target="_blank">Get this widget!</a></div>

Such a widget can act more or less as an RSS feed, i.e. instead of visiting the website every day to see what is new, you could add it to your personal portal, e.g. iGoogle, or even download it to your desktop. In order to have it on your desktop, you only need to download Springwidgets desktop application and then, on the image above, click on “options” and “download widget”. Blawgers out there could simply click on “Get embedded code” and copy-paste it on their template.

You can obtain widgets from websites such as Widgetbox or even, as I did, create widgets on SpringWidgets.

And if what you expected from this post was to learn about Widget the world watcher, here is a link where you can download the opening episode intro!