Blogged Live from DEMOfall by Alex Iskold

Ed Anuff, founder and CEO of Widgetbox gave a sharp presentation this morning introducing Widgetbox - the online widget marketplace. Widgetbox is an end-to-end solution for both widget developers and widget consumers. The Widgetbox site provides a nicely organized directory of widgets - with categories for Games, Media, Blogs and Money Making. You can either browse, search for a widget by name or provider, or just get one of the featured or most popular widgets.

But Widgetbox is far from being just a directory, it really helps to make widgets and add meaning to widgets. Developers have access to tools to abstract and parametrize the widgets, so that users can customize them. For bloggers, Widgetbox offers a Widget panel. Once this panel is placed into a sidebar of a blog, any widget can be added simply via drag and drop.

The final feature that I thought was notable is the context-sensitivity built into widgets. Widgetbox calls this Tag Awareness - it is basically the ability for widgets to be reconfigured depending on the context of the page. As Ed mentioned in his presentation, we are in the very early days of the customizable, Read/Write Web (pun intended) and widgets are going to play a big role in this new web. I tend to agree [Richard: me too!].