If you have been reading my weblog for some time now you would know how time and time again I have always been saying that weblogging, whether you do it on the Internet or on the Intranet, is always about the conversation(s), about engaging in them and sharing your knowledge and collaborating with others. Indeed, a very interesting option for Knowledge Management to explore further if you would want to look for alternative ways of facilitating that knowledge exchange. However, there are times where you may be engaging in the conversations and lose track of those folks who you may have been collaborating with just because at some point it may be more difficult to catch up than anything else. So how can you get that focus back and give you and your readers some more visibility about where you are engaging with other webloggers in the Blogosphere?
Check out WhoLinked, folks. You are going to like it. At least, I have been enjoying it quite a bit since I got it installed in my weblog after having gone through Corporate Blogging 101‘s Cool New Service – WhoLinked.com by Patrick Dodd. Patrick shared a very nice overview describing how it actually works but basically with WhoLinked, and in three very very easy steps, you would be able to get a more visual view of what other webloggers are saying and linking about your own weblog. Pretty neat, indeed. Yes, indeed, it is all about keeping track of the conversations.
So if you scroll down in elsua under the blogroll, on the left column, you would now be able to see who is linking to my weblog and with a direct link so that you can go there and check out some more about those different conversations. I know you are going to say that Technorati does some of this already and you are right but the main difference between both offerings is the fact that Technorati forces me to go to their web site whereas with WhoLinked I get to see the direct links and it would take me there right away without having to go through an interim web site to find those links. Yes, I know, very handy !
Right now you would be able to create that widget in a couple of minutes (Even less!) providing you with information from web links up to 10, which I think would be a good number to give you an idea of who else is currently linking their weblog to your weblog. If you go and take a look now you would be able to recognise some of the webloggers that I have been following up for some time now and some other interesting links that you probably never thought would be there in the first place, which is always a good thing because you can then see how diverse and engaging participating from the Blogosphere could be.
Thus if you are looking for a way to bring some visibility to those folks who link back to you and want to find an easy and inexpensive way of doing so I strongly suggest you have a look into Patrick’s weblog post Cool New Service – WhoLinked.com to see how WhoLinked works and then head over to their web site and set up your widget in less than one minute, upload it to your web site and start seeing the immediate benefits that, believe it or not, you are not along out there in the Blogosphere!
(Thanks, Patrick, for the headsup and for the great tip!)
Technorati Tags: Metablogging, WhoLinked, Technorati
Many thanks for the WhoLinked tip, it’s a great tool.
Hi Luis – I’m the guy behind WhoLinked. Thank you SO much for the nice comments… it means everything as I’m sure you know. Right now my brother and I are amazed at how it is taking off. Over 100 sites a day since we launched mid-April. Now all we need is some folks to volunteer to translate the remaining language sections like French, Russian and so on.
Believe it or not, it’s not a high-tech snippet. We are doing link: operator searches on the engines, caching the results and then parsing them by pagerank. Many people do this anyway in trying to scope out their backlinks.
Again, thanks – you’ve given me something I can show my wife to get some badly needed points back – – Todd Dunning
Thank you both, Mirona and Todd, for dropping by and for the feedback comments ! Welcome to elsua! Appreciated the headsup.
Todd, I am really glad to hear from you folks that you are doing great and that WhoLinked is really taking off big time ! Fantastic! I am hoping that you may get those translators to help you with those translation efforts because I find it really cool and worth while going for. Perhaps with weblog posts like this one we can get some more exposure and get some volunteers out there who would be able to help out. Fingers crossed.
Thanks a lot for the description of how it actually works. Actually some times, if not most of the times, keeping things simple is what works. Making technology simple for end-users to enjoy is not something that happens every time thus when I found WhoLinked I just thought about talking about it a bit to show people that sometimes less is more and simplicity rules! I am wondering though if you guys have thought about providing a next layer for the widget with something like 20 or 25 links as opposed to 10 as being the maximum. I am thinking that as time goes by and we get into the situation where a weblog may become more and more popular that lots more people would be linking to it. So having an extra layer of up to 25 links would certainly make WhoLinked ever much more interesting and meaningful for all. What do you think ?
Either way, thanks again for the feedback comments and for dropping by ! (I am sure your wife would be all right after reading through this weblog post … And many others, too!)
Hi Wendy ! Great post ! Thanks a lot for chiming in and for participating on the blog boost. I see that indeed you have already tried out the WhoLinked widget and I am not sure about yourself but I am finding it really useful specially in cases like this where I am new to your blog and I can already see who else is linking to yours in such a way that I am able to make a connection much much easier ! Very nice! Thanks for blogging about it and for helping spread the word.
Regarding your last paragraph, yes, for the last couple of years I am living (and working remotely) in one of the Canary Islands and enjoying it every minute. I used to come over here on holidays and I like it just so much that I couldn’t resist coming to live and work over here. If you would want to see the main reason why take a look into my Flickr account for some pictures of the place I live in.
Plazes is a superb widget that actually lets your colleagues, friends, family, whatever, know where you are, specially if you get to travel a lot commuting all over the place. That way, they know wherever you may be at a certain point in time, obviously as long as you take your notebook with you and have a live Internet connection. I have used it in the past and it is really good in doing what it promises: getting people together providing web presence. Highly recommended if you plan to travel a lot.
Again, thanks for the feedback and for the boost!