TypePad Widgets

I am an incorrigible Blog Bling addict, as my regular readers know. This addiction was partly responsible for instigating this very blog -- a place to put what won't fit on my regular blog. TypePad knows its users. Today they announced:

We’re excited to introduce TypePad Widgets, a new feature for TypePad that will bring dozens of features to your blog from the sites you're already using.  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.

They are offering widgets in several categories, including Commerce, Content, Music, Photos and Video (but not from Flickr?!), Publishing Tools, and Search (but not from Google, or Yahoo.) Some of these look useful, or fun; some seem to require more bandwidth than they're worth -- but we each have our own way of measuring that, don't we?

You may anticipate that at least some of these will be making an appearance on this sidebar. And no doubt these toys will be available for other blogging platforms soon, if they aren't already.