The downside of widgets

Posted by Kathryn Lagden...

It seems every day brings a new widget. In typepad (the service we use for the AIMS blog) there are currently just over 100 widgets available.

Some of these widgets are incredibly helpful. They're relatively simple to implement (ie. no coding required) and add interesting content and/or functionality to the blog.

However, as a blog reader I seem to be bumping into some frustrating widgets these days. In particular, the ones that pull content from other sources and package it up to display nicely on your site. When it's implemented the content is fresh and the links/sources relevant.

As with many things, time wreaks its havoc and the links can quickly become outdated, broken, or just not relevant to your readership. For example, If the widget is pulling content from a source outside your site and that source stops publishing

One of the widgets we use at AIMS is the blogroll. It's a list of internet marketing blogs AIMS members might be interested in reading. The blogroll is managed by one of our expert volunteers, Katharine Came, and she puts up new blogs as she finds them or people send them to her (more details here). I'm not sure if we follow-up and make sure the list of blogs we're linking to are still publishing content that is relevant to our community. It's definitely something that should be on the to-do list!

Bloggers - do you review the content being pulled into widgets like blogrolls and revise regularly?

Are you a blog reader? What is your experience with widgets on the blogs you read?

Comments

[Judy Gombita]

Someone just visited PR Conversations via the AIMS blog (I hope you liked what you found!), so definitely being on a blogroll (widget) can be incredibly helpful to bloggers in attracting new readers when the subject matter is pertinent/relevant to the target audience.

For example, we (I say "we," because PR Conversations is an international collective blog) get a larger number of "unique visitor" hits from a colleague in the UK, (Heather Yaxley, who has kindly included PR Conversations on her blogroll at http://greenbanana.wordpress.com/), than from two prominent PR-industry publishers based in the US. (Heather's Technorati Authority ranking is quite good.)