OUseful Info

Content Around the Edges - Linktracks (err, Trackmarks?! Linkmarks?!?!)

If you're a reader of an blogs hosted on Wordpress.com, you may have noticed a section at the bottom of the post headed "Possibly related posts", as described in the possibly official posting Possibly an Announcement.

In a feature we're calling possibly related posts we'll now try to show posts related to yours a little section at the end. If we find any posts on your blog that are related, we'll put those at the very top and in bold. Next we'll show other posts from around WordPress.com, and finally we'll check if there's anything in the mainstream media.

I'm not sure how much I like this feature, yet, but I'll try and keep an eye on the recommendations and see how relevant or serendipitously useful they are...

Something else you may notice if you visit a Wordpress.com block is a set of trackback links that show people who have linked to each post (trackback is spammable, so the publisher of the blog has similar controls over the trackbacks as they do over comments to a post).

I've been mulling over trackbacks for a few days now, particulalry with respect to the Digital Worlds uncourse blog. The reason? How best to accrete additional content around a post, once it has been published, to grow it as a resource over time.

In the limit, I see each post as potentially spawning it's own mini-uncourse, (think non-linear authoring and multi-course design, or similar?! ;-) so the question is- what's the best way to associate new content with the original post.

One way is to comment, another is to write a fresh post. But oftentimes, I come across a third party resource that I want to link back to one of my original courses, but that I don't want to add to the original post, or post as a comment.

One possible way around this is to associate a unique tag with each post, and embed within the post a widget that pulls in links I have bookmarked with that tag.

But I think another way is to make use of the trackback feature, and ping wordpress with a faux trackback if I ever come across a third party post or URL that I want to associate with my post.

So how would this work?

Using a service such as the reedmaniac trackback ping form, it's possible to send a trackback to one page with the URL of another. In this way, we can use trackback as a way of adding bookmarks to a post, in order to annotate it woth additional resources.

The trackback pinger actually requires at least 2 urls: one for the page you want the "trackback" (linkback? trackmark? linkmark? linktrack?) to appear on, the second for the page you want to "bookmark" (linkmark? trackmark? linkback?).

Actually acquiring these URLs at the same time is a bit tricky? One way would be to have a bookmarklet for each post you may want to link back to, and then use this bookmarklet when you are on a page you want to link back to the original page. But if there are more than one or two pages you want to link back to, this would become unwieldy.

A second approach would be to have a bookmarklet that pulls in a list of the posts on your blog, allowing you to select the relevant one, and trackmark the current page back to it. The list could even be ranked according to a content analysis of the page being bookmarked.

The third approach is to have a bookmarklet that that captures the URL of the current page, and opens up a dialogue where you enter the URL of the other page. I suppose a paired bookmark approach would even be possible, whereby on bookmarklet captures the trackback URL for your original blog page, for example, and saves it using a web variable (statex - Global Variables for the Web), and then a second bookmarklet is used on the page you want to bookmark/linkback, that also reads the web variable to populate the second URL field?

If I had a spare hour or two, I'd try this... but I'm way behind with course writing again, so no playtime...

PS doublinks are very much on my mind at the mo - I got halfway to building a bookmarklet for the Cohere API that would let you bookmark a pair of URLs at the same time from a single page (associating a link on a page with the URL of the page the link was found on) before running into a missing (or undocumented) API call; that's all been fixed now, but I haven't had a chance to go back to the backend code that supported to bookmarklet:-(

Tags: digitalworlds, wordpress, linkback, trackmark, linkmark, linktrack, sowhatshouldicallitthen

Posted by ajh59 at May 8, 2008 05:32 PM