Are You a Good Widget or a Bad Widget?

I'm not a big fan of most of the "craplets" that seem to plague so many blog sidebars these days. If the widget serves a useful purpose for the blog viewer, I'm all for it. Some of them are nothing more than time wasting tools that do more to benefit the blog author than anything else.

I received an e-mail today from Frenchman John-Baptiste Rudelle, CEO of Criterio announcing the beta of his new blog widget, AutoRoll. I get a lot of e-mail asking me to write about or test the latest and greatest web apps etc. etc. I usually give all of them at least a cursory overview and most of them end up in my digital circular file.

I decided to give this one a whirl. The concept is good , the execution is going to require some pretty good traction on Criterio's part for it become successful. AutoRoll is a sidebar blog widget that uses Criterio's "recommendation" engine to dynamically generate blog links for sites that have similar content to your own.

I'll try this for a while to see how well John-Baptiste's recommendation engine does in providing quality links. I hope it works. The time I set aside to do research for my blogging efforts is limited, this is one way to add value to our blog without eating into that time.