These days, it’s not simply all about attracting people to visit your web site. The idea is to get the information out, to disseminate the information in as easy a way as possible. And that is why widgets have become so popular.

Indeed, their usefulness is highlighted not only by the countless widgets that we use for sports and other pursuits of leisure. In fact, even the United States government has turned to widgets to disseminate information. Take the Center for Disease Control (CDC) for example. They have created a widget that automatically publishes important information regarding critical cases.

It’s not only the CDC that is making use of widgets. The Ohio Attorney General’s Office makes use of Twitter, which has its own widgets that can be placed in web sites.

Mitch Wagner of Information Week recently wrote a feature on this “movement” in the government:

One of the ways that social media changes the Web is that social media require you take your message to the people. The game is no longer about attracting people to your Web site—it’s about bringing your content to Twitter and other people’s Web sites. That’s a lesson that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) put into practice in the recent recall of tainted peanut-butter, and that the Ohio Attorney General is using for home foreclosure information.

I am sure that widget developers are aware of this and that they are scrambling to get the deals to develop widgets for government agencies. On our part, we have more widgets to make use of!

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