If you’ve got clock cycles and, perhaps, screen real estate to burn, you may want to check out “Konfabulator”:http://www.konfabulator.com and “Google Desktop 2.0″:http://desktop.google.com/ (which might be subtitled _Google does RSS now_). Both are free (Konfabulator was bought up by Yahoo, hardly a year after Apple “supposedly snubbed”:http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/dashboard_vs_konfabulator them), and each has its own interesting approach to sending microcontent from the web to your desktop–think stock quotes, news feeds, weather, etc. If you have a Mac, of course, you’re using “Dashboard”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/dashboard/ already. But for those trapped in Windows-land, these aren’t bad alternatives. My current favorite is the Google Desktop sidebar. Konfabulator widgets are cool, but the Google Desktop sidebar feels more dashboard-like, especially with “this plugin”:http://desktop.google.com/plugins/i/sysmonitor.html.