Widgets are going to be so popular. Typepad is trying to promote the widget concept to the blog engine, Typepad itself. In the past, bloggers have to modify template or manually add each html snippet generated by the service providers to a block. If you don’t know what service providers are, the very basic ones are counter services, FeedBurner, Flickr, Technorati and many more. Typepad’s blog widgets are the best solution for newbies who want to add pieces of codes to their blog without know-how.

Web widget concept has been introduced by My Yahoo! So it is not new idea at all. Now Google Homepage and Live.com have their own widget technologies. Anyway, those widgets may be not comparable to the blog widget introduced by Typepad. Wordpress has plug-in concept so that administrators can add more blocks to sidebars and add more capabilities to the blog engine. Drupal has module concept for adding more blocks, dynamic contents and more easily. By the way, blog widgets in Typepad are different from all existing concepts.

Blog widgets should be called per-user configurable blocks. Both Wordpress and Drupal are extensible through module APIs that allows developer to add dynamic blocks. Most of blocks are only configurable by administrators or so called site-wide configuration. Users are allowed to hide specific blocks for just their own view. Guest visitors will see site-wide configuration. Anyway, it is possible to develop per-user configurable blocks for Wordpress and Drupal.

Blog widgets concept is a good idea for blog hosting services. In other words, this concept is not necessary for single-user or community blog. Other blog engine may add a kind of APIs to help developing per-user configurable blocks just like Typepad offered sooner or later. It’s fashion!

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