Finding Ways to Help Bloggers Help Bloggers

Those who are ridiculous enough to follow this blog know that I have a category called “Less than Blog” that has it’s own section, and separate RSS feed. It was designed as a way to post quick blog entries that are significantly less than my usual Mitchner-esque essays. When I developed the idea mere weeks ago, I decided to post the Less than Blog entries in the sidebar, so that they have their own home on the blog’s frontpage. Recently, I’ve re-thought that on the grounds that my “friends” deserve, and can have, better.

For some time, I’ve been trying to figure out ways to link the blogroll and  the concept of syndication and recently I’ve decided to begin experimenting with some options. These options require Less than Blog to be re-absorbed into the front page article stream to make space for, hopefully, article summaries from other bloggers.

Now, I’ll discuss more on this idea after I play a bit and have more formalized, but I should note that this is not mere aggregation that I am discussing. It is community connectivity. In short: I would like to see a system where I can quickly add a blog’s feed to my list of links. From this list, I would be able to quickly configure a selection (static or generated) of blogroll links- or- a selection of article titles and summaries.

My feeling is that this semi-syndication functionality, along with easier blog link additions, will be an excellent way to do many things:

1. Lateral movement: The system would quickly promote lateral movement through the web by providing direct message links in a “what I’m reading” widget. Titles and optional summaries would be more interesting and easier to judge than just blog titles, thus promoting more inter-blog visitation.
2. Reduce need to fake it: Easy addition (perhaps an automatic but smart traceback-based system) of blog links would allow near automatic back/forth blogroll linking between blogs. Such a system would allow some people the ease of maintaining inter-blog links without suffering from the long hours of back-breaking work necessary to keep randomly generated, superficial friendships alive.
3. Exposure: Proper system configuration would allow the selective presentation of articles based on topics, which would increase exposure for other writers discussing the same topic. This is a problematic desire because of the difficulty involved, but I can see a system where syndicated blogroll articles are chosen based on the tag/category/mood of the main blog article. I talk about software and other blogs from my blogroll with recent software posts are presented.
4. Secret juice: The system I envision will have some other functionality that I’m not mentioning only because I’m not sure if it’s yet possible and it would be much more fun to discuss it after it’s actually created. Just know that it’s very linked to our dearly beloved ORBlogs.org effort.

The issues involved with this system are many, thus, I’m not expecting a solution overnight. Still, there are many plugins and applications¹ out there that are capable of becoming pieces of the overall system. This makes it obvious that a unified solution is possible, and has merely not been developed yet. Much of the space freed up by moving Less than Blog will be to test these various plugins to see which concepts I can strip for the new tool.

So that’s it. No more separate Less than Blog space (although the separate feed still works), and the possibility of a cool blog link system in the future. Oh, and anyone with suggestions, offers of help, or extra cases of Widmer’s Snow Plow milk stout hidden in their basement should feel free to contact me.

No Comment

1. especially applications developed by others for non-blog specific purposes. [↩]