My friend Dave Morgan says the widget advertising is next. Snips:
Simply put, widgets are the most recent embodiment of highly distributable Web media. Widgets permit users to separate the content from the Web page, permitting users to implant them on all types of pages, from personalized portal home pages to blogs to personal pages on social sites like MySpace or Facebook. I believe that over the next three years, widgets will change online advertising as we know it today. . . .
Are widgets the next search? I don’t think so. However, I do think that the concept of highly portable, object-oriented content that is personally and virally distributed will redefine how we think about Web pages, and how advertisers think about using the Web to communicate and interact with consumers.
That’s part of what I was writing about in my post After the Page: the deconstruction of content as we know it now (pages, sites, URLs) through radical distribution (which will only explode the audience for good content — and that ads that, perhaps, will go with it). This is why the FaceBook platform matters (don’t worry, my Facebook obsession will pass soon — but not yet).
But there’s danger here: I fear a flood of bad widgets from emergency widget brainstorming meetings in media conference rooms across the land: ‘Let’s make widgets out of everything we make! Widgetize the world!’ The best widgets will also interact with the environment in which they find themselves and, simply, will be worth embedding.
: MORE: Thanks to this blogger, who remembered what I wrote better than I did, I rediscovered a related post I wrote two years ago: Feedthink meets Widgethink. Most content is a feed and feeds can fill many widgets and that adds up to a new architecture for pages and content.
