"If you search through Google or Apple's widget library you'll find plenty of widgets from news organizations. But like much from established news organizations on the web, the product doesn't quite match with user's needs.
Let's take the RSS widget that lots of news orgs put out. What's the reason to use RSS in the first place? Aggregation. On my Google Reader I can pull in 100 different feeds. Sort them to make sense, and have all the news I'm interested in one place. An RSS widget basically just resegregates content into little (glossy) blocks.
My theory is that for a news org, these widgets are designed as a marketing tool. Sure, I can visit the Today show's web site for the latest cooking tips. But why miss the chance to stare at Matt Lauer on my Yahoo! Widget bar all day?
So what's the point of informational widgets? While the standard web site allows you to read information, the key to widgets is they allow you to monitor information.
My two favorite widgets are package tracking and flight times. A year ago if I wanted to track my Amazon shipment, I would go to my email, find the tracking number, go over to FedEx, find the US package tracking tool, paste the number... Now the widget automatically updates that information for me, and all it takes is a glance at my Dashboard to see when my DVDs are arriving.
So what news can you monitor as oppose to read? Stocks and weather are obvious areas already well tapped. But as the 2008 elections ramp up, poll data and results stream in from the primary states. Slate has a cool little feature called Election Scorecard on their site which is begging to be made into widgets. During the '04 elections electoral-vote.com became a sensation in the blogosphere for its aggregation of state poll data to predict the winner of the electoral college (as opposed to the Gallup and Zogby polls pushed in the MSM that focused on national totals).
The widgetizing of news speaks to the central problem of most news websites today. We still tend to think of news as a 600-word block of text instead of unfiltered information.
What's the best way to tell the story of the Iraq War's cost? An 800-word piece about the latest appropriation? Or a widget calculator estimating the total cost?
Much like blogs, the point of a widget isn't to have a widget, the point is it's another story form on the web. And for now, mostly untapped."
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