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You can sign up for a developer account to get a sandbox to play in 

Google Gadget Editor: http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/docs/tools.html#GGE^{Image Added}

Google Gadget Sandbox: http://google.com/ig/sandbox/^{Image Added}

Don't have to be a coder; can just plug and play as long as you know flash file or feed name; others require HTML/XML, CSS and Javascript skills; they make code available

Markup and tags: <ModulePrefs>-Gadget settings; <UserPref>-User personalization (customized databses); 

Publishing gadgets: Go to http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/docspublish.html^{Image Added}

Add metadata to help SEO: e.g. title_url=LIBRARYLINK

To see how it was done, View Source on existing gadgets

Best practices:

Think small apps;

• start simple (search box)
• Enter a lot of metadata
• Host your files locally (more control) and then let Google know you updated
• Use dev tools
• Monitor stats

Tracking stats (several ways)

• iGoogle dashboard: igoogledeveloper.blogspot. com/2009/11/launching-igoogle-gadget-dashboard.html
• Google Analytics
• iGoogle Directory stats

Pretty good stats esp. for Wikipedia map, video repository (campuswide for these); search widget;

Unique users have selected widget and put it on their page; page views is how many times people have hit it in

Demos: lib.montana.edu/tools/gadgets.php

lib.montana.edu/%7jason/

Other people doing this:

• Nina McHale: crln.acrl.org/
• Ed Metz: http://socialnetworkinglibrarian.com/index.php/archive/igoogle-gadgets/\\^{Image Added}

Future: 

• Micro-library apps
• What will happen to the library web
• Library services as widget
• Rolling your own everything