One of my favorite concepts to explore in online marketing (especially affiliate marketing) is the continuing emergence of micro platforms as vehicles of sustainable revenue platforms or possible monetization of presence platforms. 

In this post last year titled “Widgets and the Future of Affiliate Marketing,” I rambled on (and on) about the need to explore the widget-sphere because of the large amount of connections that this platform of communication and information retrieval (and dissemination) has with paradigms such as affiliate marketing.

Read Write Web follows this sort of modality with a post that makes the points I’ve been trying to make (but in a much more coherent and clear fashion!)…

We are seeing an increasing number of media companies and publishers turning to widgets. But why? What is it that media giants expect from these microchunks of their content?

Apparently a lot. Media companies see widgets as an important new method of reaching audiences both inside and outside their domains. It seems that widgets cover array of tasks ranging from brand propagation to instant transactions and customer tracking. In this post we will take a look at how web widgets have evolved from cool, viral toys of self-expression to important big media tools.

The Evolution of Web Widgets: From Self-Expression to Media Companies