Susan Mernit (Yahoo, the Widgety Goddess) summed it up when she coined the phrase:

Welcome to the world of widgety goodness

It’s almost bibical.
Feeds(RSS) begat outliners(OPML)
Outliners begat tags
Tags began microformats
Microformats begat APIs
APIs begat widgets
Widgets begat start-ups
And the great mash up settled over the land.

Filed under: conference, widgety goodness