"The Year of the Widget" (MSNBC) and Unintended Consequences

If you've read this blog for any length of time at all, then you probably know that I a big fan of widgets (previous post here). So I was all over it when I saw this story from MSNBCNewsweek talking about how Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of  “search products and user experience” said that the market for the kind of functionality that widgets or gadgets offer is going to be “to be very large.” By then though, I was already thinking - duh..MSM takes so long to get around to what the blogosphere already knows...but then I hit this sentence "widgets could signal the end of the page view as a metric for measuring a site’s popularity"  - a quote attributed to this post from Steve Rubel.

This got me thinking down a new lane. I had been thinking how we could serve up content via widgets for a low-threshold way for learners to keep uo to date on a range of knowledge but now I'm thinking - what kind of architectural changes will have to be made to LMSs that will allow them to track student interaction via these bite-size apps?  How will we ROI the  value of  allowing people real-time tracking  of  knowledge and content directly related to their job and their performance? Do you just measure downloads? What if  is a standard part of the desktop - will you be resigned to focus groups or ethnographic studies to determine their effectiveness or do we track if the organization's performance is increasing while access to standard course offerings is dropping?