Blog This

Jeremy points out MSN’s use of the "Blog This" button and notes this would be useful on Yahoo!’s news pages.  The flickr version of the idea is a bit cleaner and simpler, and it seems built to support a more agnostic view on your blog tool of choice than what MSN is doing.  It would make sense to adapt that function across the network, though I’ve never seen a "Blog This" function that actually helped me post something.  I prefer to write and then link to things, personally.  Maybe I just haven't seen the right functionality yet.  We should at least add 360 to the flickr list of blog tools.

The other thing I’d like to see on the news pages would be a "Tag This" form or "Save This" button right at the top of the story.  I often save things to MyWeb with the intent of reading them later, and it would be nice to be able to do this from within an article page right near the headline.  The Yahoo! toolbar is very useful for this, but it would make sense for publishers to offer this function inline to their pages since not everyone is a toolbar user.

There’s another approach to this problem that Marc Canter and a few others call "Redirect This".  It uses more of a send metaphor and captures structured data.  The intent is to allow users to take items such as photos or calendar events or ratings or anything that has understandable structure to it and send it to a tool that knows what to do with that data.  You can imagine a greasemonkey tool that let’s you flag items on pages and drop them into a shopping cart.  You could then distribute all the items in your shopping cart to the various locations you maintain around the web.  You could add a photo to your flickr account, a restaurant review to Yahoo! local, a quote from someone’s blog to your blog, all with a simple click or two.  The tool would require some kind of clearinghouse for shuttling all those actions, but maybe that’s something we can provide with our infrastructure here. 

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