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Syndicated further reading recommendations

I frequently find myself reading something on someone elses blog and thinking “that’s interesting, and it fits in well with XXX that I read the other day”. I often end up blogging a link to both just to satisfy my need for completeness. Wouldn’t it be interesting if there was some standard for formalising this kind of further reading recommendation? I’m not sure exactly how it would work (it would almost certainly be XML based but I don’t know if it would require a new format or integrate with an existing one) but it could be an interesting avenue to explore. I think it’s a significantly different problem to the ones solved by XFML (external shared metadata) and Pingback for it to be worth committing some thought cycles to. Any ideas?

Posted 20th November 2002 at 10:49 pm

This is Syndicated further reading recommendations by Simon Willison, posted on 20th November 2002.

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4 comments

  1. So what you are looking for is a way to indicate additional reading with a weblog entry? Or a way to indicate a direct link between two weblog entries?

    PeterV - 21st November 2002 01:14 - #

  2. Sort of a mix of the two. I want to be able to post a file that says "if you liked this external link, you will probably like this other external link as well" - then have some kind of tool / agent that collects up that kind of data and makes it available in some kind of way. A bit like Google's related sites feature but based on human recommendations.

    Simon Willison - 21st November 2002 07:56 - #

  3. The best example I have seen on this on the 0xDECAFBAD website. Which Ties MovableType & Twiki together with very effective results. If I understand it correctly, every weblog entry is parsed looking for wiki topics and adds linkbacks directly to the wiki. (for blog entries and referrers.)

    The practical result is that the weblog is used to dump data chronologically and the wiki ties everything together and makes connections.

    Once I have some time to reinvent my Blog I'm going to be looking into this. One feature that simplify the automation even more is to have it automatically create wiki topics from the body of a blog entry if the entry title was an unused WikiWord.

    Here is a good example from decafbad: http://www.decafbad.com/news_archives/000323.phtml

    Xian - 21st November 2002 08:40 - #

  4. Here is Leslie's own discription of the decafbad system: WeblogWithWiki

    Xian - 21st November 2002 08:50 - #

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