Widget Wonders and Woes

October 22, 2008
 

Today’s show is all about widgets, and to start us off, Susan Esparza, Michael Terry and Virginia Nussey look at how widgets can help your business. From desktop widgets to Web widgets to mobile widgets, these portable snippets of functionality have become increasingly popular during the last year. They can generate viral buzz for your brand, creating links by entertaining consumers.

Patrick Sexton, SEM manager at We Build Pages, is a widget developer and strategy expert who writes about leveraging the medium on his blog SEOish.com. He talks to Virginia about creating a cross-platform widget strategy and the best ways to go about branding widgets. Patrick will be speaking on the Wonderful World of Widgets panel at PubCon.

Then Susan, Michael and Virginia examine some of the potential downsides of widgets, an opinion that centers on security issues and distraction tendencies. By embedding outside code into your page, users are susceptible to the third party’s prying eyes. Furthermore, as widgets become more commonplace, it’s important to remember that ad blindness symptoms can apply.