As you may or may not have seen, Blogger have released a new beta service, which you can migrate to if you're special and use the blogspot domain rather than FTP'ing as I do. The new features are comfortably covered in a post by Tony who I think, was first to blog about it, and on Google Blogoscoped.

Anyway, having had a poke around the source code of pages generated by Blogger Beta it appears they've introduced a widget structure to elements on the page, most notably the labels and archive bits in the side navigation.

Why do I find this interesting, well, a couple of reasons spring to mind. Widgets are generally reusable elements, bits you can slot in anywhere. But also remember that the new layout editor is lifted from Google Pages (so says Phillip.) Add to that Google's other services, Google Desktop and Google Personalized Home Page, all three make use of “gadgets” (read widgets) that can be written by anyone. Taking a small leap it is not hard to see a future feature of Blogger allowing you to add these gadgets into your Blogger template and vice versa - that would be a very nice feature indeed. Or maybe I'm imagining a Blogger utopia, something that will never exist. Comments?