Guess who just joined the early adopters of Internet Explorer 8's new WebSlices feature? None other than the open-source, free encyclopedia site, Wikipedia. Thanks to Wikipedia user Soum Yasch and others, Wiki templates have been built to support the new IE8 WebSlices. You can see them in action on this page, which is the only one featuring them just yet.

If you hadn't heard, WebSlices are a new IE8 feature that let you subscirbe to content directly within a web page. You access them from your IE Favorites Bar, where you'll be able to click on them and see real-time rich internet content. (via)

I just saw a post this morning about Sean Lyndersay's new Sidebar gadget called the "WebSlice Viewer Gadget." This brilliant little creation brings IE8's WebSlices (bits of web content that you can access from the new IE8 Favorites Bar) right to your desktop via a simple Vista Sidebar gadget.

The gadget, currently in alpha (you've been warned!), requires Vista (unknown if x64 supported, but let us know), IE8, and a web page that has some WebSlices. Each instance of the WebSlice Viewer shows only one WebSlice, so you will need to open multiple gadgets to show multiple views.

You can download the WebSlice gadget from Sean's SkyDrive.