What is blog flare all about? What is a widget?

Blog flare and widgets are everywhere on the Internet today. This seems to be the new big trend. It makes some sense to me. A blog is fairly uninteresting looking. They are built from templates, which means that yours looks just like the next 500 that are created. Therefore, people really want a way to stand-out from the other bloggers so they can catch some attention in the blogosphere. In comes flare and widgets. Widgets are a form of blog decoration. Some people have called them the bumper stickers of the Internet. There was a big movement, at least in the US, back in the 80's where people put bumper stickers on their cars. The idea was that anyone could express themselves with a bumper sticker. You have people looking at your car anyway, why not make a statement. Well, the dynamics on the Internet are certainly different from driving, but some of the analogy holds true.

Widgets and flare are a way to personalize your blog and help your readers understand you. The more the author can make their blog a true extension of themselves, the more interesting the blog is likely to be to read. I think this is the human psychology behind why people post these things in such large numbers. I also think there is another entire group of bloggers who are simply posting for financial gain. In these cases, they don't spend much time on their blogs. For them, these added little pieces make the blog look more "lived in." It's like staging an empty house that you're trying to sell.

The technical dynamics of blog widgets is really straight forward. The widget provider gives you some HTML code that you paste into your blog. Many of the major blogging platforms permit this, some don't. While the IT execution is fairly straight forward, what this means for the Internet is actually quite profound. And I think this was the design of the HTML approach in the first place, but it's only now really being leveraged. HTML and IP was invented for distributed processing and decentralized hosting. By this, I mean, the page you are looking at can be a collect of content / code from a bunch of different servers. Sure, we all knew that. But with the growing popularity of widgets we're seeing the concept stretched to an entirely new dimension. Widgets are basically an mini-application running on your blog, hosted on someone else's server. You can have 10 widgets on your blog which are all provided by 10 different servers. Very cool. It's abstracted the very definition of what an "application" is even further into virtual territory.

Stay tuned!