Widgets are tiny single-purpose applets residing on your desktop. This widget reads an RSS file hosted by Yahoo with content provided by Thomson Peterson’s.

Penn State University recently announced the launch of news widgets. Widgets are single-purpose applications residing on the desktop. Widgets deliver news, fetch stock quotes, weather updates, and so on. There’s no word as to whether Penn State’s widgets eat RSS feeds, like many widgets do, but my guess is that they do.

Mac fans will recall that a widget engine is built into Mac OS X Tiger. And Yahoo recently acquired Konfabulator, a widget engine for Mac and Windows.

Elsewhere in widget news, Educational Weblogs this month hints at some possible applications for widgets in education.

This morning I downloaded Konfabulator, and within minutes tiny little widgets appeared on my XP desktop - a clock, a window showing pictures from one of my folders, a Yahoo search input box, a battery level indicator, a WiFi signal level indicator, and the weather in Palo Alto. Soon I downloaded and fired up Digg Digger, a widget that displays top stories from Digg, a technology news website.

When I downloaded Combarss, the possibilities started to click. Combarss is an RSS feed-reading widget that combines the headlines from several feeds into a single “river of news” (Dave Winer’s term). I quickly added several of my favorite feeds: feeds from Sinkingships.net, Eduweb, Collegewebeditor, and Marc Canter. Now, without firing up my news reader, I can glance at my desktop and see the titles of the latest posts from these blogs.