USA Today began offering three kinds of “widgets” this week, with plans to offer four more in the future.

Designed to rake in advertising dollars through ads offered on them, USA Today's widgets can be installed by online users onto their blogs and personal Web pages. The widgets will then pull news updates and information from the newspaper's site.

Internet giants like Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. offer a variety of widgets, which do things such as update local weather or sports news. Google calls them gadgets. The startup Slide Inc., which provides widgets, began offering ways to place ads on them, according to the Associated Press.

USA Today's current offering of three widgets, available at www.widgets.usatoday.com, are compatible with sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Blogger and iGoogle, and are all related to travel. The four widgets to come will focus on pop culture news, top headlines, informational graphics and top headlines.

No advertisers have bought widget ad space yet, Kinsey Wilson, USA Today's executive editor, told the AP.

Although The New York Times began offering iGoogle users a widget displaying a weekly crossword puzzle and The Wall Street Journal is developing several widgets, USA Today is the first national newspaper to offer users a widget that can be detached from a Web page and put on a personalised page, J.B. Holston, CEO of NewsGator Technologies Inc., told the AP.