IN the few short years that the web has existed, there have been many battles to get the attention of web surfers. In the early days, giant, spiralling web portals were created where every service a company like Yahoo! or Altavista had to offer were all displayed on a single sprawling page.

These days, portals are out of fashion and hardly anyone remembers Altavista.

The latest attention land rush is all about smaller and smaller spaces and the small web applications that run on them. These tiny web applications are called widgets.

Widgets are pre-packaged pieces of code that can be attached to a blog, website or social networking profile. Widgets provide additional functionality to a web page or blog and no technical skills are needed to create or attach them to your web property. Within five minutes of attaching a widget, your once static and boring web page can be displaying slideshows of all your family photos and all set to your favourite cheesy '80s music.

For the end user, widgets allow you to create a far more entertaining and useful website without getting tangled up in complex software code; for companies like Facebook and Bebo, they mean not having to spend time and resources developing new bells and whistles to keep users happy; and for the widget makers, it can offer access to the home pages of millions of web users.

MySpace alone has more users than most large countries have citizens. If MySpace were a country it would be the 11th-largest in the world in terms of population. With the average MySpace user having more than one widget on their profile, that's a lot of widgets being used and a large and relatively new market to jump into.

Two Irish companies that have made the jump into offering widgets are Dublinbased UseAMap. com and Sligo-based PollDaddy. com. Vinny Glennon from UseAMap. com describes how its service came about.

"The idea was originally coined a few months ago when a friend circulated a pretty basic hand-drawn map with directions to his house for a party. Once we all got past sniggering at his poor drawing skills we realised that there should be a simple online service that people could embed on their websites, circulate via email and hopefully add to their Bebo, MySpace and Facebook pages."

UseAMap allows you to choose a map from Google Maps, add some notes and instructions and then embed it on any site. Alternatively you can email an easyto-remember web address to friends so they can look it up online. For example a map for DCU can be viewed at www.UseAMap. com/dcu. The service is just two months old, and through word of mouth alone, over 2000 maps have been created.

PollDaddy. com is an online widget for creating polls to place on your website, blog or social networking site. You can pick and choose from one of the many different poll designs or design one yourself.

It is free to use, and PollDaddy polls are currently served up to 300,000 times a day to people.

David Lenehan from PollDaddy thinks widgets are a sign of a changing web where end users are demanding more control of their experience.

"The web is fragmenting dramatically and has been for a few years. Ultimately it is a good thing if services are distributed and opened up to each other.

It makes life easier for the end user.

Information is available now in formats where you can choose when you want to see and how you want to see it."

Like countless web services these days, many of them rely on building up massive user bases and then "flipping" (selling to you and me) themselves to other companies such as Yahoo! or Google. Having a userbase in the millions means a company that makes nothing from its users can still be worth a lot since it has the attention of thousands or millions of people.

Of late though, MySpace and Bebo are seeing the value of widgets and the potentially new revenue streams widgets can generate. As a result mySpace has started to lock out some widget makers and Bebo will only allow widgets once you partner with it. Since widgets benefit the creators and the websites they are on, these lockouts are simply negotiating stances so the websites get their share of revenues.

Even if widget makers were unable to do business with every social networking site in the world, there would still be 77 million blogs and hundreds of millions of web pages they still put their widgets on - still a big market for small products.

QUITE CONTRARY LAST week we mentioned that the various political parties were having some issues with their websites. This week we're staying with politics, where a satirical version of a Mary Harney video has now been watched more times than the original that Harney made.

The 'Political Thicko' video can be viewed at http: //url. ie/3kf, and it also links to the Mary Harney video.

Ironically enough, the real Mary Harney video has had its viewership double thanks to the satirical video pointing to it.