Ever hear of widgets? It’s the buzzword of the year for the Web, but few still appreciate how to best use them. How can you use widgets to increase the inbound links to your site? Are there widget directories you can optimize for? What social media strategies are most effective?

Moderator: Bill Flitter, VP, Marketing, Founder, Pheedo

Getting a virtual slice of pizza might be fun and all, but five-month-old startup gBox is betting that people would rather receive something more tangible this holiday season. It’s also betting social networkers will appreciate its new Wishlist widget more than Facebook’s Beacon program.

Users of widgets are more likely to receive them from friends than from companies that created them, according to a new report from JupiterResearch, "Widgets: Delivering Applications Users Want." User between the ages of 18-24 are six times more likely to receive widgets from friends than from a company.

Just when you think the web world is going to settle down, get out its pipe and slippers and kick back, someone rips up the blueprint and we have to start all over again.

If you have content on a website, all it takes to make that content an embeddable widget is a little bit of code, which Clearspring happens to have available for free.

Web developers and designers for huge companies and niche sites alike are all jumping on the social media bandwagon, realizing that social networking, user-generated content, video-sharing and Widgets are more than just ways to kill time in the office; they can be incredibly effective in growing and increasing audience engagement.

All of a sudden, widgets are getting very hot. I discussed Lemonade Stand last week, which is essentially a widget that attempts to combine affiliate marketing with Web 2.0.

Of all the SEO principles out there, two remain at the forefront as the most essential: keywords and links. Understanding the language of the searcher (the words they will use to find you) while maximizing the external link love (how search robots know whether you are trustworthy) are top priorities for anyone trying to optimize their website.

The ‘My Times’ personalized start page has opened to the website’s readership as developers work on rooting out the remaining bugs in the service.

In what there calling "The Facebook Effect," metrics firm Quantcast says widgets developed on the Facebook platform are driving substantial traffic spikes for the websites they’re connected to.

The challenge of measuring the reach of a website for advertising purposes has become increasingly complicated, thanks to the myriad ways of distributing content.

Widgets are all the rage lately, as evidenced by the avalanche at Facebook once the social networking site opened up to developers. Advertisers, too, are figuring out that if you want to get to the younger crowds, widgets are the way to go.

The eBay Developers Conference in Boston offers up some juicy tidbits for online retailers, from forthcoming third-party applications and research tools to ways to hire certified developers to create widgets for your website.

The WSJ has a report (sub) on comScore’s latest study on the growth of web widgets.

Speaking of Search Engine Strategies Toronto, did you know that Incisive Media now hosts half-day and full-day training sessions – intensive workshops on special topics to bring you fully up to speed – the day prior to the SES conferences?

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook, sent the blogosphere into a digileptic (digital + epileptic) episode yesterday evening, announcing that Facebook was now officially open for you to tamper with.

The Google Co-op offers a handful of nifty little tools that can provide you with all sorts of useful information (from the time, to the traffic, to the weather, and so on).  But a recent upgrade allows users to “have live data included in your Google searches.”

Social networking site Facebook is about to make things interesting. The company is expected to announce this week that it will open up its site to developers and Web services companies who want to connect on a more intimate basis with Facebook users.

One of the WordPress development team, Ryan Born, noted in his post WordPress 2.2 Release Candidate 1 will not include a tagging feature, the next version could include a comprehensive taxonomy framework which could open up the field for interesting plugins.

The year has been an interesting one for WordPress bloggers with the release of about 5 major and incremental upgrades since the start of the year.

After getting my new Mac yesterday, I am pleased to see that Google has just started supporting these beautiful machines. I’m a fan of Google Desktop, having used it on my last two machines and I enjoyed it quite a bit. However, I am disappointed to see that the Mac version will have no widgets or the toolbar yet. Being an organized sort, I rarely had the need to use the Google search on my desktop. My primary joy with the package was the widgets.

Yahoo has announced extensive updates to its cross-OS widget platform, changes which are aimed at improving performance, increasing functionality, and providing new features and services to users.

Of all the new releases in Widgets 4, the Flickr Widget is probably the one that shows the most promise. It allows users to display, upload and tag Flickr photos, as well as giving users the option of dragging and dropping large groups of photos into the widget and edit the tags and other information without needing to open a browser.