Which Widget What??? What are they? What do they do? and Which ones do I need?

I was feeling so smart the other day when I learned about how to add widgets to my blog page.  Which first required that I gain some better understanding of what they are.  Leave it to Wikipediato come to the rescue.  Anyway after some brief insight as to what the little gizmo's are I began what now seems to be an endless search to find out where they are and what they do and which ones I should add to my blog. 

Who knew what magical little things they are?  I have only just begun to explore, but already I understand that you can add widgets that keep track of everything from the weather to politics.  Widgets that allow you to more easily share content from other web pages on your own page.  Widgets that find and display similar content to your posts.  Widgets that allow you to set up custom searches (to only search certain urls.)  I even discovered that you can make your own widgets, (don't know much about that yet I think it may require that you understand some HTML.) 

I have no doubt that I am rather late getting into this whole widget game but I am still a little giddy with the excitement of it all anyway.  It really is true the more you learn the less you know.  I feel like I discovered a whole new mysterious world.  It's a little overwhelming I wish there was a directory of all the widgets that explained what each one did and showed you what it looked like.  So far I have not found such a thing but here are some links that provided some illumination.

netvibes ecosystem  There are almost 60,000 widgets on this site alone so get yourself a comfortable chair.

spring widgets The rabbit hole gets deeper.

widget box Are you getting the impression that these go on to infinity yet?

typepad widgets  This is a good place for beginners like myself who use Typepad. 

Needless to say I don't feel so smart now and I have already accepted the fact that I will never know what all of them are or what they do.  I do hope to find and use some of the ones that will most enhance my blog and who knows some day I my even make my very own widget.