Advertising has become one of the Internet's most important economic engines. Thus, advertisers, online-advertising hosts, and the technology vendors that support them are always looking for better ways to get potential customers to look at their material. This is particularly the case because banner ads and other types of online promotions have proven easy to ignore. Now, though, the Internet advertising community is trying something new with an old technology: widgets. Widgets are portable, lightweight Web applications that can be embeded in an HTML-based page.