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Widgets, or the Blog as christmas tree

Fred Oliveira on October 19, 2006

Everybody loves widgets - they’re everywhere. They’re on “Ajax homepages”, like Netvibes, Google, Live.com, on my OSX Dashboard and on the new Windows Vista Sidebar - everywhere, really. Now, they’re starting to invade our blogs too, and the question is: when is it going to stop?

Content first, please

Widgets give you one thing and one thing only (at least so far): little bits of useful information. Now, useful information is exactly that, useful, but usually (most of the time, I hope) not as important as content. That’s why the OSX Dashboard hides widgets away so you only see them when you need them.

Let’s put it this way: what’s really important to your readers? Is it what you write on your blog, or is it the last tracks you’ve heard on Last.fm, or maybe the time in San Francisco in a beautiful stylized watch, or webcam widgets showing 5th avenue (everybody loves those) or, let’s go all the way with this, what about a streaming music player? - I bet everyone would love that.

widgets

The fact is, nobody really cares about anything but your content - and truth be told, thats good: it means you write, and people read. So what is the point of having weblogs look like christmas trees if that only annoys the hell out of people, makes page loading a pain in the butt, and confuses the eyes to a point where they scream at the brain: “Find the feed URL and lets get out of here, now!”.

Well, Christmas is coming, right?

The “blog as christmas tree” is the metaphor I came up with for the widgetification of weblogs and websites. People cram everything they can into layouts, like they were decorating a christmas tree. There is one very important thought here, though: in a christmas tree, the focus is the tree, whereas on your blog, the focus is your content, not your recent searches, your google ads, your shopping list or your 50 album recommendations. Remember when people visit blogs like this, their brain screams “get out, just get out now!”.


Comments on this post

James Livine

On top of my Xmas tree: Webwag.com !

Josh

I think it’s sort of interesting that you have this rant about widgets (and some of it I agree with), but then you include a screenshot of a widget that could actually *add* value to a blog. If you write a hockey blog, don’t you think that the day’s hockey scores and latest news from ESPN might be of interest to your readers?

Your issue seems to be with personal widgets–ones that provide information that is really only of use to you (the weather in your hometown, the music you’ve just listened to, your flickr photostream, etc.) … But there is another breed of informational widgets that could easily compliment your blog or website with useful, relevant content that readers would want to know.

I think you need to make that distinction.

Fred

Good point Josh, that distinction clearly needs to be present. Still, the point here is that most people (in their blogs and websites) are adding clutter, not adding value. There is, in fact, a bunch of widgets that are relevant given the right context, but the vast majority of widget instances out there are for the “bling”-value, not information relevance. Blog widgets are the new wrist watch, golden tooth and car hydraulics system (useless, but some people still thing others care).

andreas

“Find the feed URL and lets get out of here, now!”.

Your right. That is what my brain is screeming almost everytime I visit a new site.

Nice!

Is your blog too heavy?

[...] This was recently illustrated by the case of A VC Blog, where Fred’s site got so bad, it warranted its own “wow, my blog is slow” post. Fred from Webreakstuff gave him the lowdown about what was actually causing the unbearably slow page loads. [...]

Mi otro blog… » Blog Archive » Consejos para (futuros) bloggers (II)

[...] En Folksonomi se proponen 7 maneras para optimizar tu blog en un artículo que tiene relación con el publicado en Webreakstuff donde se recomienda evitar convertir los blogs en “árboles de Navidad” a base de incluir widgets de todo tipo. [...]

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