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JS-Kit likes to imagine itself as the Robin Hood of widgets, freely giving website enriching tools to web publishers to help them compete against marketplace "big boxes."

From a ratings content widget, to polls and comment boxes, the free JS-Kit widgets allow anyone who can handle a simple cut and paste - read anyone who has created a MySpace page - to turn their blog or website into an interactive, dynamic site. One doesn't even need to login, register or sign up for the widgets, they are free for the taking.

This lowering of the technology bar, as JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux put it, is a major step in giving web publishers a way to provide the rich, multimedia and social experience their visitors are beginning to expect—without breaking the bank or hiring an engineer.

"If you are not a technology company and/or the community features are not core to who you are, you are not a MySpace, than you are not going have either the money or the technical ability to build these services, maintain these services and make them competitive," Loux said. "It's not just small sites, it's everyone that isn't in the very top couple percent."

Last week the Burlingame, CA-based company announced it has secured $1.2 million in seed funding from the Entrepreneurs' Fund 3. The company is serving 70 million page views a month and has 6,000 registered users, according to Loux. Most of the funds will go toward engineering, he said.

With it's widgets "for the people" mentality, it makes sense that the idea behind JS-Kit was inspired by a comment box widget that creator Lev Walkin designed for his wife's website. His simple, easy to use code

Now, while Robin Hood's stealing from the rich and giving to the poor makes a good tale, the fable isn't known as a rags to riches story. Which is to ask, as many of critics and fans of the site have, how is going to survive or succeed financially, especially since Loux has pledged that the free widgets will remain free for the taking?

The answer from Loux is that JS-Kit employs the data that the free, yet smart, widgets aggregate, via other services built to continue boosting a website's traffic.

Subscriptions are available to a widget that shows, for example, the top rated content on the site, based on the all of the ratings the website has gathered from visitors or users so far. A publisher can choose to subscribe to the service or allow a relevant advertisement to be placed at the bottom of the badge with a revenue share with JS-Kit. The price of the subscription is what JS-Kit believes it would have made from an advertisement.

With the top rated badge, old posts and pages can be re-monetized as people see content and ads from previous months, days or weeks that they may have missed, Loux said.

"If you want to go to the two-dimensional view, it's going to drive people to your site," he said. And, "using the top badge pays you twice, one is we are going to do a revenue share, and two, you are going to keep the revenue off of the pages that the ads that you show on that other page."

Another possible tool is using the top rated content widget across similar, and even competitive domains. Five smaller sites may form together in a federation that features the top rated wines, or articles, for example, of each. This provides more value to the visitor, Loux said, and keeps eyeballs within the group rather than having them stray to bigger, more well known "big box" sites.

"We are not just going in there and saying, here are some tools, and I hope that does something for you," Loux said. "We are bringing in tools that aggregate data, so that we can both make money on your site, and then we are providing the possibility that you can aggregate your content across the domain and really compete and really go for page views and traffic."