The Blog-Roll Of The Future
Last night, while attending WordCamp Vancouver, I was exposed to many great ideas from some passionate individuals. While listening to John Chow talk about advertising, and how many people who are familiar with the web actually ignore ads (which in my case is entirely true — I never click them), I started thinking about other areas that were similar.
One aspect of a WordPress blog that seems somewhat dated these days is the blog-roll. In principle, a blog-roll is nothing more than a list of sites that you basically endorse on your site. The problem is that there’s no context to the endorsement, and no real reason for the average viewer to click on a link in your blog-roll. It’s not very often I get links from someone else’s blog-roll, but it’s quite often I get traffic when they mention me in a post. The reason is, in my mind, because the post provides the context for the endorsement.
To that end, I think the typical blog-roll is a dated concept, and is in need of a refresh. One idea I’ve been toying with is sort of the opposite of a ping-back. That is, a list of sites that you’ve endorsed, along with a brief snippet that gives context to the endorsement. For the lack of a better name, let’s call it a ping-forward for now.
Given that I routinely link to my friends in my posts, effectively these ping-forwards now become my blog-roll. People I talk about often will stay near the top, and people who I rarely mention will slowly migrate to the bottom. It’s essentially a content-based blog roll that dynamically adjusts itself as you create new entries.
We have a ton of things on our plate over here at BraveNewCode, but I might take a stab at a quick ping-forward prototype this weekend. If the idea interests you, let us know here.
5 Comments
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Good ideas Duane. We need to look at WordPress as a whole from another angle. Many people out there are starting to use it beyond “posts” and “blogroll” and making brilliant innovations, which I think is great.
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Duane,
I agree. I’d bailed on the blogroll feature long ago, but was still sorta searching for a way to give ’shout-outs’ to folks.
Seems like what you’re talking about is basically sort of like a ‘recent comments’ display type dealy only with recent links…er something.
Good luck.
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Combining this with people that comment on your blog would be interesting — the admin section could let you tweak weighting between your outgoing links, people that comment, and people that trackback.
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This is a great concept for contextualizing outbound links. If it were to be some sort of automated wordpress plugin, it would need to take into account sites that are linked to often but which we might want to exclude from the ‘blogroll’. An example would be Wikipedia. I link regularly to wiki articles, but would never want it on my blogroll.
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duane 1 year, 9 months
Just curious why you wouldn’t want it? I think you have to look at it like something different than a blog roll, that is, something that doesn’t necessarily represent just your friends. In that context, I would think showing a link to wikipedia is relevant, since you linked to it in an article. But I’m interested to hear why you wouldn’t want it.
