Widgety Goodness 2007 was right on our doorstep today in Brighton, so I popped down to check out if there was anything new and interesting from an online publisher’s point of view.

We heard about widgets that automatically deliver content tailored to you and your friends’ Facebook profile, and we heard about widgets that overlay full-screen internet TV, to provide additional information about the video you are watching or just so that you can chat to your friends online.

We even heard the burgeoning widget universe being described as a Darwinian disco (© Steve Bowbrick), which conjured up for me a vision of a lot of middle-aged publishing execs trying to get on down with the young things on the dancefloor and dancing out of time like deranged orangutans.

Naturally, we heard a lot of pitches. But also a helpful dose of scepticism, as the following video sample from Russell Davies of the Open Intelligence Agency, shows:

Not good news for glossy magazine publishers then. Those perfume ads help pay for a lot of people’s wages.

Laura will update with more tomorrow, but bottom line, widgets will be getting smarter, cheaper and more ubiquitous in 2008. As long as publishers and marketeers don’t forget to put the user in control, they can be a good method of delivering personalised content across a number of social and local platforms.

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