Logging the conversation

Logging the conversation
: Yesterday at lunch, Jay Rosen said he wants a blog plug-in that would automatically take the links in a given post and put them to the side because that turns the post into a curriculum (I’ll let him explain that).

I’ll add to that: I’ve long wanted a running compilation of my links — to whom am I linking and how often and what’s the trend? This tells me, among other things, which sites are the first I should read, which give me the most link value. This also tells you which sites I value and that says something about me.

This is also inspired by Dave‘s subscription commons, which, as Ross Mayfield says:

uses pooling to create network effects. Its actually very similar to FOAF efforts like Plink, as many auto-generated FOAFs come from OPMLs, although nodes aren’t people, but with the added benefit of finding what writers are reading.

In other words (that is, in English), the more we can capture and quantify what you read and to whom you link, the more we know about you; the more we can do that for your group of friends — as determined by your links — the more we know about that group; the more we know about the conversation in that group, the more we know what the buzz is.

9 responses to “Logging the conversation”

  1. Swerdloff Avatar

    Post them to the Lazyweb using trackback, and someone will likely build them…
    The link scraper isn’t that hard to do, I’d think.

  2. michele Avatar

    I was thinking of making a daily list of the links I use in my posts. I’m sure someone could come up with a decent plugin that would allow you to do this with MT or other CMSs.

  3. hugh macleod Avatar

    I guess theoretically the tech isn’t that hard to do, the internet being what it is etc.
    but surely the machine would have to be able to ascertain what KIND of blog was being read? political? cultural? teenage blogging? the machine would need some kind of apparatus for measuring qualitative information? Maybe some kind of google-like algorithm that could search for key words or something.
    now i don;t know if henry copeland does this or not, but when new blogs sign up to his Blogads service, he should make them fill out a detailed questionaire… age, politics, location etc. the more info he’s got the more he can feed it into “the matrix” to paint demographic pictures for his larger clients.
    my current ad campaign is currently running on half a dozen different blogs… but there’s no reason to suppose Proctor & Gamble would not want to run a similar campaign on thousands. at such time decent algorithyms will be essential.
    are you listening, Henry?

  4. Anil Avatar

    I’m fairly sure I’ve seen a plugin to do this for MT. If I can find a link, I’ll write it up on the Movable Type site. If anyone else finds it first, let me know.
    For what it’s worth, that was the original genesis of my Daily Links list. Then it got out of control and took over my life.

  5. button Avatar

    I think you can take this too far and go overboard with it. What you’re doing, in part, is to pull your perspective back and alter the field of vision to a different viewing distance that can dehumanize the subjects.
    How odd that Anil says it got out of control and took over his life… because I was going to say that I thought he handled it sufficiently.

  6. xian Avatar

    I think the MT plug-in is called MTGather?

  7. Joel mackey Avatar
    Joel mackey

    This post is only relevant to this thread as regards technology for blogging sites, so read or disregard as necessary.
    For sites trying to cultivate a healthy comment section, i would like to see some technology which allowed the moderator to imbue his commentors with ratings over time, using these ratings to give them input back into the comments section weighted by how positive or negative thier ratings are.
    For instance, if several commentors are frequent and make interesting, insightful, or informational comments, or are merely trustworthy and share the same goals for a comment section as the blogger, they would be rated higher, than say some one-time flamer linking from some opposition site, who merely wants to instigate immature word fights.
    As a comments section matured(more data points regarding posters), the moderator could allow high rated, trusted commentors to police other commentors, so that flame throwing trolls trying to destroy a good thread could be dealt with, without a blogger’s micromanagement of multiple threads.

  8. David Sifry Avatar

    Jeff,
    The Technorati API can help you with this. You can see who is linking to you in near real-time (cosmos), and you can also see who you link to as well (bloginfo).
    Let’s talk about it some more, I’d love to see your plugin developed, and the good news is that the data is already there…
    Dave

  9. Ross Mayfield Avatar

    Thanks for translating Jeff.