Just as Mark was discovering that I oughta be one of the people in his social network that he doesn’t yet read, I was implementing his LINK tag, in part because I felt a little bad that I mentioned at Phil’s how cool I thought Andy’s linkback thingo was (after Phil in fact mentioned the thing at Mark’s), having forgotten that I also saw that very same thing at Mark’s and thought it was indeed whizbang. Funny how that works.
I’m dizzy.
Big-ass Edit : There are more people than I knew talking about this manufactured serendipity instant feedback stuff that linkbacks or backlinks (or whatever you wish to call them) imply.
deus_x says here, for example :

Referral-driven linkbacks on all pages on my site do this. If you post to your weblog and include a link to me, then I hear about it the first time someone traverses that link. This, to me, is even better than the comment feature. And, as Mark Pilgrim observes, this is better that a single referers page because these linkbacks appear in context. The conversation is built up from links in place and on topic and where the action is.

I won’t go as far as ranking referrer feedback over comments – I’d like to bring comments into the whole picture, bring them up front and center dynamically, when appropriate, and tie them into the linkbacking too. I’d like to see weblogs where the comments threads offer more value to some visitors than the actual posts, while others never hit the comments at all and still derive value (I’m slipping back into my old corporate-speak, sorry) from their visit. Not unlike the way some folks go to Metafilter for the links, some for the convo, but both groups get what they want from the place. I’d like to be able to follow both speakers and topics (based on permission being granted) around blogspace, depending on the mood I was in. I want my MemePop thing. And I want a pony!
As you can tell, I’d like to tie all this in with the half-assed thoughts I’ve been having recently about following conversations in the blogosphere, but I haven’t thought it through yet, really, as is probably clear.
The word that’s bouncing around my brain right now is ‘swarming’, but that’s not right, either. I’m not much attracted to the ‘news aggregator’ take on all of this, but then I haven’t played much with that sort of thing yet. I will, soon.
Cool – I always like new toys to play with.

Category:
Metablogging

Join the conversation! 2 Comments

  1. Important note: the standard for RSS LINK tags has changed. Please update your template.
    http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/06/02.html#important_change_to_the_link_tag
    Isn’t it fun being an early adopter? 🙂

  2. I didn’t manage to figure out quite how I’m going to do it, yet, but referrals for following conversations is looking better to me all the time. Especially with Mark’s auto-discovered RSS feed listed in the referral listing, so that once you see that someone’s talking about you, you can throw their feed into your aggregator to see what else they have to say. Me, I don’t care how often or how much I post, but I’ve noticed that some people are reluctant to leave their best stuff in someone else’s comments, so you need to follow them back to their lair. Hmm. Maybe I’ll go post about this.

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