Nick Is Against Widgets

Nick Denton has come out against widgets and listed five reasons for that stance on Valleywag.

And he lists this blog as an example for one of his reasons:

2. A sluggish page is a bad page. A page only loads
as fast as the slowest widget. All those annoyingly flickering messages
in the status bar of the browser — Read, Connecting to, Waiting for. I
blame widgets. Fred Wilson’s blog is a laboratory for these web
modules: the venture capitalist’s site is said by Alexa to be among the slowest on the web, with a load time of 11 seconds.

Well, you can read this blog in a feed reader and avoid the widgets entirely. And now that I load the center column first, you can read the blog on the web and be off to another page before all the widgets load (and Alexa is wrong, it takes a lot longer than 11 seconds for that to happen).

But Nick is missing the point of widgets entirely. You can’t build a business on widgets alone. But if you have a business; YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, MyBlogLog, Digg, etc, etc, you can get distribution on other’s pages with widgets. It’s a content and brand distribution strategy.

Maybe Gawker blogs will never carry widgets because Nick is a purist and believes that widgets are "a violation of blog principles". I’d like to see where those prinicipals are written down, because I missed them and want to know what other principals I am violating.