chrisg.com

Jeremy Zawodny has gotten his dislike of JavaScript Badges and Widgets off his chest

With all the talk of how the web has “become writable” with advent of blogs and self-publishing tools, you’d think that we’d have a better way of getting third party content on to our sites. Given that an overwhelming number of sites that are likely running PHP or some other “dynamic” hosting setup, these least common denominator solutions just feel wrong. (This could easily be followed by a rant on problems with the spread of web services and RSS.)

I mostly agree. Some blogs are getting pretty ugly from excessive use of these knick knacks and the vast majority of them don’t add to the visitors experience even when they don’t detract from it.

The appeal though for the average blogger is the ability to just copy and paste some code. While Jeremy makes good points he is talking from a geeks perspective, not the average Joe/Jill Bloggers. Anything requiring hacking PHP or interfacing with web services is just not going to catch on. Heck a lot of bloggers I know ask for help installing plugins.