"I just finished reading the Salon article mentioned a minute ago, and there's a compelling suggestion in there, one I hadn't thought of: what if, while browsing a site, you could see what other blogs said about that site? Just click a button, and see a list of sites that had pointed to the site you were currently visiting.
This ought to send Jenny's mind reeling - it's a kind of massive annotation project. It takes the best of Google, Blogdex and Daypop and rolls them into one. It also transforms blogs from chronological archives to topic-specific commentaries linked by unique URLs. I like it.
And here's one for Rory, Ernie and Denise: combine this with Rory's comments from yesterday. When reading a court opinion on a particular topic, I could see what other lawyers had said about this decision, read opinions from other jurisdictions who had linked to it, and even see related commentary by topic. This takes the notion of metadata and exposes it in its most useful form - by establishing connections between related data and distributing it to interested individuals. (This is a bootstrapped version of what West does with their keynote system.)
As Neo would say, 'Whoa.' " [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]
If I understand all of this correctly (and it's entirely possible that I don't), it's called "backlinking" and I first saw it in action over at diveinotmark. It started with disenchanted, got picked up by Jon Udell, and was implemented by Mark as "further reading on today's posts" at the end of each day's collection. If I was any type of a programmer at all, you would already see this in effect on my site because I am so fascinated by this flow. I am floored by the potential for library blogs.
