Wanna see mine?

[OpenMike]

USA Today offers news modules with 'widgets' that users can put on personal pages


NEW YORK (AP) - USA Today is plunging into a hot new Internet technology, offering its online users the ability to install "widgets" on their blogs and personal web pages that contain news updates and other information from the newspaper.

Widgets are a web accessory that people are using in rapidly growing numbers to jazz up their home pages, blogs and profiles on social networking platforms like Facebook or MySpace. Users of Microsoft Corp.'s new Vista operating system can also put widgets on the desktop of their computers.

Big Internet companies like Yahoo Inc. offer large varieties of widgets - Google Inc. calls them gadgets - that give snapshots of local weather, games and sports results or display pictures, for example. A startup called Slide Inc., a major provider of widgets, last month began offering the ability to place ads on them.

Kinsey Wilson, executive editor of USA Today, said in an interview Wednesday that the newspaper began offering three kinds of widgets this week at www.widgets.usatoday.com and has plans to offer four more.

They're all aimed at making money through advertising offered on them, though no advertisers have signed up so far, USA Today spokeswoman Alex Nicholson said. USA Today's widgets are compatible with many blogging platforms and social networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Typepad and Google Inc.'s IGoogle.

USA Today's first three widgets are all related to travel. The ones to be offered in coming weeks will have news on pop culture, top headlines and celebrities and informational graphics like those that run on the paper's front page

[PMC]

USA Today offers news modules with 'widgets' that users can put on personal pages

Although this is a fine maketing tool, they are not the first kids on the block... the weather network offers a nice software assortment.

http://www.theweathernetwork.com/weathe ... wcwxbutton

The compatibility factor is what counts most of all... this is a tough thing to achieve when ideas and ways of use of the technology change.