I believe I have finally seen the light as to how the Internet Topic Exchange (ITE) could be made simpler to use and more viral at once,
taking one cue from my colleague Stephen’s recent ridiculously easy shibboleth strategy for putting together conference aggregators and another from Joshua Shachter’s now-defunct reversible.org.

1. Right now submitting a post to a channel requires people to either fill in a form
   on the channel page of their choice or send a TrackBack ping to the
   channel. Both are simple, but still harder than they should. How about
   adding a third option: simply link to the channel in your post. To make it easier, the top of each channel page could even provide some standard boilerplate chunk of the requisite HTML.
2. In order for this to work the ITE needs to watch the participating weblogs. It already watches for weblog updates,
   so just let people register their blog or feed once and let the ITE
   pick out the posts that link to it as they appear thereafter.

Note that this new option automagically generates visibility for the channels on participating blogs with
every post submitted; this is one of the key elements
that were missing for effective word-of-mouth propagation of awareness
of the Exchange. I’m kicking myself for having taken so long to find a simpler way.

Of course, along with ease of use comes more spam. I’ve been thinking about this too - more later.

[Phil Pearson]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2004 at 9:07 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.