The screens are becoming one, slowly but surely. The announcement yesterday of The Widget Channel from Intel and Yahoo may not signal the turning point, but it's a significant evolution.
Intel and Yahoo will introduce technology to redesign the HDTV --- combining a processor with a platform --- to deliver widgets of updated content (sports, auction, business) at the bottom of the  screen, somewhat like the original multifaceted Bloomberg TV screen model that now occupies many cable offerings.
The announcement has some powerful endorsements from Comcast, Disney, Sony and a wave of letters of support from the likes of CBS, Motorola, and Samsung.
Now there are several hurdles to this channel: The TV technology is costly and still not widely available, among them. But when large entities begin to collaborate like this, it's only a matter of time before the major applications emerge.

The publishing giant Random House is offering a widget to book lovers in the U.K. to browse hundreds of titles --- up to 5,000 by the end of the year --- in the hopes they'll eventually click to buy something. In essence it'll be like having a library on your personal page, something to flip through at your leisure, then purchase when you decide to take the next step and fully read the book.
Widgets are touted as a major opportunity for content creators. Given the Web's direction toward personal pages, social media maturity and curated content, Random House won't be the last to spread its holdings this way.

Jupiter Research's Barry Parr has outlined some best practices for news organizations in the Web 2.0 environment. His report is proprietary, but the David Card blog from Jupiter pointed to three elements of it this week:
1. Content creation and distribution should be separate businesses.
2. Widgets should be a key distribution strategy.
3. Partners are important as publishers consider themselves platforms.
If you think about what news organizations were thinking about two or three years ago, this makes your head spin.

In the discussion on the future of media, some attention is shifting to the power of so-called "widgets," the transportable mini-pages of content and programs. A McGraw-Hill conference this week heard that soon every consumer-facing Web site will contain widgets of the user's choosing, and that the early winners in this profitable arena stand to be conventional media. Eric Alterman of the widget-creating KickApps firm believes online ad companies will become widget distribution networks. MediaWeek's account of the conference is here.
We've always been accused of being little different than a business making widgets. Maybe that's not so far off the mark.