Typepad has introduced Widgets. This is exactly the kind of development I’d hoped for when choosing Typepad (vs. Movable Type or WordPress) when I first started my blog.

What’s a Widget, you ask? It could be a list of your most recent photos, or a topic-oriented search box, or a stats counter, or ads that help you make money, or a badge to help your users subscribe to your feed, or even a Flash game or a chat window. We call it “bling for your blog.” We’re launching with dozens of widgets from more than 30 partners, and more are on the way.

Many people in-the-know already understand the power of microformats and Widgets are conceptually analogous. Think of a calendar entry on a web site. Today, there are a bazillion ways to post event information online — but everyone is doing their own thing with code that is standalone on their site. With one microformat, hCalendar, events could be tagged, subscribed to or “fed” to calendars all over the internet. Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set
of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted
standards. Learn more about microformats.

Widgets, while technically not a microformat, at least pave the way for non-technical people to travel down the path of understanding the power of little snippets of code that allow internet connected machines to deliver alot of additional functionality for miniscule amounts of effort.