In the Seventeenth Century, Britain's merchants drove its economy, establishing trade routes and alliances that formed the basis of the Empire. In the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, it was the Spinning Jennies and steam engines of the Industrial Revolution that drove our commercial success. In the Twentieth Century, that changed again and we developed a knowledge economy that generated income from our skills, understanding and creativity.

And in the Twenty-First Century... we have widgets. The snippets of code that bring the content of other sites onto your own or allow users to create miniature applications, media players, and more

This event is a part of Widget Week, themed events from NMK, Mobile Mondays, and Chinwag.

The Premise:

On December 30, Newsweek magazine declared that 2007 would be the year of the widget. What did they mean? That while in 2006 it seemed that every notable web business revolved around 'user-generated content', this year would not so much be about content as about distribution. Widgets allow publishers to extend their reach far beyond their own websites, into blogs around the world, into a 100 million social network profiles and onto users' desktops.

Is this happening or about to happen? Is it really possible to build or extend your business on the basis of something that sounds so improbable? The sale of MyBlogLog to Yahoo! in January showed that widgets certainly have some value, but are they really as powerful as Newsweek and other pundits would have us believe?

The Panel:

Matt Loney (Chair) is the editor and site director of ZDNet.co.uk, recently overseeing the site's adoption of reader blogs and other Web 2.0 features.

Ivan Pope is the CEO of Snipperoo, a British Web 2.0 company that promises to organise your widgets like no other. Ivan started his internet career as publisher of The World Wide Web Newsletter in 1993, then did things like NetNames, WebMedia and .Net magazine.

Fergus Burns is the CEO of Nooked, a market leader in RSS Marketing, with a background in numerous start-ups as well as a six-year stint at Microsoft.

Tom Hopkins is Senior Business Consultant at Conchango, with a specialism in usability and user experience. Previously, he was MD of VCCP Digital.

Venue link: CC Club

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Report on the event.