Widgets?

Last night while I tried to sleep I was plagued by thoughts of widgets. What are they? Do I need them on my blog? I think a week or so ago I heard a show on NPR about some woman who had got an award for her widgets. Or maybe it was an article in the NYT. At any rate, I heard (or possibly read) the whole piece and still didn't know what a widget was in the end. And then yesterday, as I'm looking through various Blogs for Dummies type sites trying to figure out how to do pictures (get them, put them where I want them, make them the right size - really none of which I was able to figure out), I saw more about widgets. And I still don't know what the little f'ers are.