BusinessWeek has two articles assessing the mania over widgets. The first piece largely explains what widgets are and ultimately proclaims these applications as “turbocharg[ing] the third phase in the internet’s development” after portals and search engines. Noting the control widgets give users as distributors of content, CBS Interactive President Quincy Smith notes how the network is tapping into these tools. “We can’t drive everyone to CBS-dot-com-backslash-CSI-backslash. Nobody is around.” Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, who now heads social networking service Ning, goes one step further: “Concepts are now able to spread on a million Web sites. It’s super exciting because you can get huge scale very quickly. The big widgets have the potential to become the new networks.”

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The article also highlights Facebook’s decision to open its 28 million members’ user profiles to widgets. And in contrast to MySpace’s practices, Facebook also began allowing developers to reap all of the revenue they generate from advertising and e-commerce, giving widgets a major boost. And while marketing experiments like Reebok’s recent widget creation called “Shoe Fight,” which lets users design a sneaker and put it on their website, are also moving the ball along, Google is likely to spur a great deal of activity thanks to its widget grant program. As we previously reported, Google is making $5,000 grants or $100,000 seed money available to widget makers and it has begun testing Gadget Ads, which lets online retailers transform their display ads into a widget by adding videos, animation, and real-time news or marketing data to them.

The second article expands on the marketing uses mentioned in the first. Despite all the articles explaining how widgets are changing the face of the web, it seems that companies like MySpace are still having difficulty helping businesses understand what widgets are and why they should advertise through them. In order to get the word out about widgets’ marketing uses, a number of developers have formed a widget marketing association. The members include widget makers Clearspring Technologies, RockYou.com and Gizmoz. Measurement company comScore has also signed on. The group’s second goal entails defining the standards around which a widget market can be created. Lastly, the question of how - or whether - to compensate users who feature marketing widgets on their site is also up for some consideration.