In my opinion, widgets are one of the best and most transformative things about web 2.0. It's fantastic that you can take little chunks of websites and put them in other sites, and bring things together so easily. Considering one of the potential pitfalls of using these sites is 'spreading yourself too thin', it's very important to build prominent links between all your online profiles, and widgets allow you to do this in a nice, visually appealing way. I populate the sidebars of all my blogs with widgets to everything else that I think is related and that I want on the page - as Penny said in her introductory post on the main blog it allows you to make a 'you central' - a one-stop shop for all your web content. It's one of the things I really like about the VHL blog as opposed to our website, that it's so easy for me to do this. And as it is just a case of copying and pasting code that the sites generate for you, you really don't need any technical knowledge at all to create a really rich and dynamic site. In short, widgets plus RSS feeds are the answer to the question: how do you find time to keep all these different things updated?
I've been adding various widgets (Flickr, delicious, Twitter) to my blog as I've gone along, so this Thing was really done well in advance. I haven't been quite so on the ball with adding things to my iGoogle page (probably because, no matter how many times I try, I never quite get converted to using iGoogle), but delicious was one of the gadgets I chose back in week one.
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