Auto Link Trail

Jim Bassett at Digital Media Tree has come up with a way to include at the bottom of a blog entry a list of all sites that refer to that entry. Well, “all” is too strong; for a linking site to make it onto the list, someone somewhere has to actually follow the link. But there’s a certain unintended Google-like effect of this limitation since it excludes links no one has ever bothered to click on.

You can see this running at Jim’s weblog. At the end of the article, next to the “[link]” button, there is a link to “[ref]” (with the number of references noted). Click on that link and you’ll go to a page that repeats the original post and appends, in a gray box, a list of all the pages that have linked to that entry. (You can go straight to the page with the gray box here.) If all works as planned, this blog entry — mine, the one you’re now reading — should be on that list also.

Cool! And a useful step towards reifying blogthreads.