Cross-posted on e.politics.

Inspired by the May 16th e.politics/techPresident article on the conspicuous lack of presidential campaign widgets, a group of software developers has started to build their own — if the campaigns won't help their supporters spread the word, these guys are happy to do it for them.

Based in the thriving tech hub of, um, Idaho, the folks at Widgetnest have taken the first steps toward creating a comprehensive suite of widgets for campaign promotion. As a start, they've built some nice-looking widgets to display RSS feeds for Edwards, Obama, Romney and Guiliani. Here are the ones for Romney and Edwards:

Nice work! Maybe the campaigns would like to follow suit and create their own? How about holding a build-a-widget contest, with the most useful widgets and their creators getting featured on the official campaign site and in outreach emails? That'd be a nice alternative to the omnipresent create-a-video contests. Encouraging volunteers to create outreach tools — that's crazy talk. What is this Internet thing, some kind of conversation?

Check out the Widgetnest gallery for more widgets by the same folks; they have a nice display-any-rss-feed tool, for starters.

– cpd