Another Thinkblank conception (this time co-created by Cal and I) was thought of yesterday and launches in a very beta version today. It’s called Metalinker (because now it’s retro cool to use the prefix meta) and if you’re reading this on the front page of my site, you should be seeing its effect all over the place.
Simply speaking, Metalinker is a way of connecting weblog posts about a similar subject together. With the simple addition of a small amount of javascript to your page, your completely normal weblog posts are suddenly annotated – each link has placed after it a simple link to Blogdex’s list of other people who have referenced the same link.
It’s not a complex idea, but it’s quite an elegant one and one we think that gestures towards some of the functionality that a future web might include as standard – a kind of self-referential, reciprocally-linking semantic model that our little toy only skirts around (with all the glamour of an almighty hack). We hope you enjoy it!