Techmeme (which I also wrote about here) is a great service for tracking emerging memes on the blogosphere. What's really cool about it is that it does a great job of identifying the significant participants in the discussion around each particular topic. It finds the most legit, prominent and to some extent - even the most interesting - blog posts and associates them automatically to each story.
Trouble is, very few people know about Techmeme.
So I was thinking - given that this 'related discussion' piece is really solid and valuable, why not offer bloggers to add to the footer of each blog post a Techmeme badge that will automatically show links to the most relevant/interesting posts around that topic? Sort of an automation of the trackback mechanism, making it 10x more useful and easier to maintain with the most relevant links.
I will definitely put the 'Techmeme Auto-Trackback Badge' on this blog as soon as it's available.
[UPDATE] - Great post by Tom on the trackback spam problem. One of the byproducts of the excellent Techmeme service is that I have never ever ever encountered a spam link on it. And I hit Techmeme probably 5 times a day.
So I'm wondering about some variation on the theme above - Maybe the solution to trackback spam is some reputation score assigned to each blogger which would be used for easier (or automated) trackback filtering?
It sure seems like Techmeme has some magical way to avoid spam and show only legit posts. Maybe extracting some "reputation score" and letting the blog publishing tools poll it for each trackback is an even better idea than the one I started with. As eBay has shown us, having a great reputation system in place is an amazing asset to own.
Hi Galai, thanks for the suggestion. I don't have the infrastructure in place to switch that sort of thing on, though that could change down the road.
Posted by: Gabe | August 30, 2006 at 08:27 PM