Steve Hall, at Ad Rants, has a nice post up summarizing a panel discussion that took place at The Chicago Ad Tech, titled "Widgets and Applications -- The New Media Network."  The panel included people from Gigya -- one of NewsGator Widgets' partners (see here) -- Sprout, Slide and Omniture.

I wish I could have seen the panel discussion myself, but I'll have to rely on Steve's wrap-up of the discussion.  I'd like to point out what I think are the major nuggets of information from his overview of the panel's discussion:

• The "old" ad world can be seen as Ads 1.0, where advertising is about interruption and intrusion; the "new" ad world, seen as Ads 2.0, is a world where people are not interrupted by ads; rather, they interact with unobtrusive ads -- such as widgets.
• Widgets should be thought of as elements of social media and not a replacement for advertising banners; they should be thought of as a form of branded content distribution instead of (ad) campaigns.
• The metrics (or analytics) of widgets usually boils down to brand awareness, but widgets can address many needs; rather than force "old media" metrics on widgets, the panelists argued for the creation of widget-specific metrics ahead of launch to determine success
• The way widgets spread and where they end up can be analyzed to determine which demographics are interested in the content of the widget; it's sort of like reverse-targeting: monitor where the widget goes, then examine the demographics of these sites

Thanks, Steve, for providing us with ears to the discussion.