Where we used to we used to watch ads (what a concept!), our children are playing with widgets. Widgets, the Washington Post reports, allows people to do everything from design their own sneakers to create a ringtone to check out Hong Kong traffic or the surf at Australian beaches. Yahoo now has 4,300 widgets in its gallery, “blog publisher TypePad offers ‘blidgets’; home-page creator PageFlakes lets people incorporate ‘snippets’ into their personalized pages; Netvibes, Snipperoo and YourMinis host widget galleries,” according to the Post. Car maker Mini Cooper has a Web site that lets you design your own Mini Cooper credit card (which provides a bit of credit toward your Mini purchase to each transaction). The founder of Searchles social-bookmarking site told the Post that widgets are the “glue” between users and the product or content they want. This is pretty immersive “advertising” – just as much so for adults as for kids playing “Lucky Charms” games in Neopets.com. Teens and adults are wise to it, but it should be clearly labeled as advertising where kids are concerned, and this is great fuel for family discussions about critical thinking. [See also “Widgets: Huge on the social Web.”]
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