Dear LazyWeb,
Bloglines, Technorati and probably others do a passable job of presenting direct references to a blog entry. (Minor complaints: With Bloglines you have to subscribe to a feed or preview with a “siteid” internal to Bloglines; if your blog has multiple duplicative feeds (e.g., rdf/rss2/atom) direct entry references only appear for one of the feeds; Bloglines makes no attempt to consolidate or allow feed owners to consolidate; Technorati appears to use screen scraping and picks up some garbage along the way.)
So here’s my LazyWeb request:
I want to know, without lots of extra clicking, not just resources that directly cite blog entry A, but resources that cite resources that cite blog entry A, and so on. In the context of Bloglines, instead of “2 references” I want to see “2 direct references, 3 level1 indirect references, 1 level2 indirect reference”, “6 references, 2 direct” or similar, and I want to be able to see all references, direct and indirect, on a single page. In the context of Technorati, indirect references could optionally be part of a “watchlist” feed.
Will Bloglines, Technorati, or some up and coming aggregation service please do this?
I’m not terribly interested in visualization of social networks implied by blogs (blogosphere visualization, blogversation maps?) or even blogthread visualization and the like here. Neat, but too heavyweight to use daily. I just want a small feature increment.
Mike, this is a great idea. Someone (LazyTechnoratiDeveloper? :-) could certainly write an app using the Technorati API to do this.
Product marketing wonk lazily takes note. Interesting idea Mike, although I’m not totally clear on what your goal is. Are you more interested in the epidemiology of a particular post, or the shared interest of the group downstream?
Epidemiology of a particular post.
BlogPulse Conversation Tracker
BlogPulse Conversation Tracker comes closer to fulfilling my wish for a blogversation interface than anything I’ve seen before. Missing: ability to see presence of a blogthread outside the context of the conversation tracker.
I built a similar tool…
[…] Late last year I requested that some blog aggregator give some indication of the existence of indirect blog post citations, i.e., a blog thread. Adam Hertz suggested that this could be done using Technorati’s API. […]
[…] N-level blog entry references is parodied by the silly social media Curator’s Code. Not really, but consider blog:microblog::multihop backreferences:curator’s code. […]