Let’s face it, nobody really likes widgets. More so, one that has a name that is supposedly derived from a corny play on the sound a frog makes, and the word ’scribe’. While I have to admit that I’m not a big fan of frogs, I will also have to admit that we don’t actually have to like widgets, in order for them to become useful. People put widgets on their blog or site for the primary reason of the functionality and benefits it bring to the blog or site. Everything else comes second.

So people, meet Skribit. A social suggestion widget for blogs, which allows readers to suggest topics for the blog, and vote for topics already suggested, in which they would like to see wirtten on the blog. This is probably its main purpose, to let readers tell bloggers what to write, and should provide a useful cure for bloggers, against the occasional writer’s block. Skribit is currently released for public beta, and you can check out the recent developments at the Skribit blog (the blog also uses the Skribit widgets to ask readers what they want to know about Skribit. Talk about reusability!).

Among others, it is 100% free to use and easy to set up (4 steps). Having said that, it is still a beta, which could mean 2 things - you haven’t seen nothing yet! or don’t expect anything much yet!. Among the things I’m looking forward to is how Skribit makes it possible for readers to connect with fellow readers, and discover related blogs, like they claimed. Also, hopefully the widgets will have more customization options, if not fully customizable.

Now that I have a Skribit widget on my blog sidebar, please feel free to suggest topics you think I should be writing about, and vote for the ones you like. While I somehow take this as a sign of weakness on my side, for not being able to spur up topics without the help of readers, I’m also quite certain this reality-tv-styled-let-viewers-decide-widget will help conjure up those really interesting topics for me to work on.

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Side note: One of the co-founders of Skribit is Paul Stamatiou who runs PaulStamatiou.com, one of the many blogs I enjoy reading. Apparently, he’s also not a big fan of widgets, as you can see from this post.

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