Pen-Elayne on the Web

Tracking It Forward

Via Max Sawicky, apparently you can install code on your blog template that uses "the Technorati search functionality... so a blog can provide a distributed commenting system that incorporates transparency and accountability." I think that means it can show remote comments from other blogs; a sort of trackforward instead of trackback. People like Brad DeLong are wondering if this will signal the end of comments sections, but I doubt it - people enjoy two-way (or many-to-many) conversation too much to give it up even if the signal-to-noise ratio becomes annoying. Anyway, here are the codes to enable a "Link Cosmos" on various kinds of blog templates. On Blogger it seems to be something like this; I'm substituting square brackets for the usual carats (and your blog URL for an actual blog URL) so if you copy and paste this you'll have to change "[" and "]" back to "<" and ">" and of course put in your blog URL where apropriate:

[a href="http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&sub=mtcosmos&url=your blog URL[$BlogItemArchiveFileName$]%23[$BlogItemNumber$]" title="Technorati Cosmos" target="_blank"]Technorati-Trackforward[/a]

Does an enterprising Blogger user (Laura?) want to experiment with this and see if trackforward capabilities work? I'm not entirely sure how to test them...