While reading this article on the Washington Post website I noticed a new (new to me at least) feature offered by the Post that allows you to add their news content to your site through little Flash widgets.

If you scroll to the bottom of the article you will see the "Iraq News to Your Site" section which allows you to grab the news widget code for your own site. They also make it easy to add it to Netvibes, iGoogle, and the rest of the start pages.

There are also a number of other widgets for specific topics like Sports and Politics, with more on the way. This is actually a nice idea and it's something that I would have thought one of the major newspapers would have implemented sooner. It's one of those things you see that makes you go, "Duh. How'd I not think of that?"

But there are a few things that would be nice to see as they continue to develop these widgets:

• First: A non-Flash widget. I'm guessing Flash was chosen for cross-compatibility reasons, but there is nothing technical in these widgets that couldn't be done with HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
• Second: The continuous scrolling animation is annoying. Turn this off. The content should create supplemental value, but the animation encroaches on annoying ad territory.
• Third: Build a tool allowing users to create a custom widget, styling included. I'm pretty sure that most of the sections on the Post website offer aggregated content, so a simple tool that allows people to build a widget that pulls custom content, and the ability to then style the widget to fit their website, would be great. Digg does a great job of this with their Top News widget.

Hopefully they continue to develop this widget platform and make some of the improvements necessary to take it to the next level. There are some smart people over there, so I'm sure it's in the works.

The Washinton Post Web Team usually does some really progressive things, and this widget initiative continues that. I'm also impressed with the brass at the Post for promoting a tool that somewhat encourages people to not view the actual Washington Post website — it shows that they understand the importance of brand awareness within the community. Even if they are sacrificing a few page views in the short-term (along with a few ad dollars), they are creating a nice platform for the Post to deliver content through in the long-term.