NMK's own event on the subject of widgets came at the end of a week of related events, beginning with Mobile Mondays and continuing with Chinwag Live. Naturally, we benefited from the 'wisdom of crowds'.

The panel was chaired by Matt Loney (Editor and Site Director, zdnet.co.uk) and consisted of Ivan Pope (Snipperoo), Fergus Burns (Nooked) and Tom Hopkins (Conchango).

The discussion began with input from Ivan Pope. His company has developed what he calls a 'very niche content-management system' - a CMS devoted to widgets. Website owners can arrange widgets from third-party websites into blocks which the user can then restructure and re-arrange at will.

The product came as a consequence of trying to work out ways to monetise his blog. The process for creating Google Adsense blocks seemed extremely inefficient. You have to visit their site, sign up for an account, specify the nature, size and colours of the adverts you want, then cut and paste the resulting code into your own pages. Every time you want to adjust any of these parameters, you have to start again. Snipperoo aims to simplify and streamline this process, not just for AdSense, but for all the third-party services you use.

When he started the company a couple of years ago, nobody was talking about 'widgets'. Instead, people spoke about 'snippets' of code - and that, for Ivan, remains his definition of the word. Widgets are not some sort of unified standard format - they have occurred without any planning. As with expressions such as 'web 2.0' and 'social software', it's impossible to tie down the precise meaning of 'widget' - the meaning is still evolving, and accreting significance, through usage and remains fluid.

Widgets are not some sort of magic formula for commercial success, though. Some widgets - Pope nodded towards the RockYou widget for sharing photos - have been extremely successful on some levels, generating billions of page views, yet don't have any visible means of turning that into revenue.

Fergus Burns has hopefully avoided such a fate by starting his widget company from a purely commercial basis. Nooked provides RSS marketing services for brands, particularly in the travel and retail sectors, creating widgets that people can put on their sites to advertise offers. For Fergus, widgets are RSS repackaged. They take a feed from a web server and present it in a consumer-friendly way. "It's RSS in a way that doesn't make people's eyes glaze over." For these special offer widgets, ultimately, all they are is a link back to the host's website. The difficulty has been, of course, being able to persuade site owners to install these widgets. It's not an impossible task, though, given the right incentives. He cited the success of the Ding! widget produced by South-West airlines. It's a desktop applet that alerts users with fare deals related to their chosen favourite airports and cities. So far, it has registered two million downloads and there have been no complaints about the potential invasion of privacy this might be deemed to represent.

For Tom Hopkins, widgets represent the atomisation of the web. The separation of content and form, with information reformed according to users' whims on websites, portals, desktops and mobile phones. He noted that widgets are often also talked about through a paradigm of personalisation: that they are 'bling for your blog', a type of digital jewellery that allows MySpace users to express their personality. For Hopkins, widgets are not nearly ready for the mainstream, though, in terms of usability and polish. At the moment, widgets provide an interim solution to the problem of empowering users to create their own rich web experience.

One of the best known widgets, MyBlogLog was the subject of some discussion. The widget records who has visited your page and - if that visitor is a member of the site themselves - it shows their portait on the widget as they visit. Panellists pointed out that it is unusual in that it is a widget that has value on its own, without ever visiting its home site, creating a distributed social network that attaches to every blog the panel is installed on. It also provides rich data about users' behaviour; it is 'cookies done nice' in Hopkins' words. Apparently, though, the development of this widget was almost entirely an accident. The service was originally intended to be an analytics product for bloggers, providing traffic information. The CEO of the company was initially against the development of the widget, which was 'knocked together in a couple of days' according to Pope.

Serendipity, as always, has a way of transforming what might seem the most trivial internet idea into an online sensation. The reverse can always happen too, of course.

Event Chair Matt Loney summed up a number of obstacles to the development and adoption of widgets. His company serves up hundreds of thousands of pages a day. The value of those pages is in the money paid by advertisers on a CpM basis. This hampers the development of anything that might cut down on page views, from AJAX interface improvements, to full RSS feeds, to widgets distributing the content (sans adverts) to other sites. Until major publishers can view such activities as loss leaders to improve customer relations and loyalty, the commercial directors of the company are likely to be anxious about the implementation of any technology that might reduce impressions.