Whenever you write a blog post that contains links to other posts, and is maybe in turn linked to from other blog posts, how can you keep track of where you blog post sits “in the wider scheme of things”?
In Trackforward – Following the Consequences with N’th Order Trackbacks, I showed a technique for tracking the posts that link to a particular URI, the posts that link to those posts and so on, suggesting a way of keeping track of any conversational threads that are started by a particular post. (This is also related to OUseful Info: Trackback Graphs and Blog Categories.)
In this post, I’ll try to generalise that thinking a little more to see if there’s anything we might learn by exploring that part of the “linkgraph” in the immediate vicinity of a particular URI. I’m not sure where this will go, so I’ve built in the possibility of spreading this thought over several posts.
So to begin with, imagine I write a post (POST) that contains links to three other posts (POST1, POST2, POST3). (Graphs are plotted using Ajax/Graphviz.)
In turn, two posts (POSTA, POSTB) might link back to my post:
So by looking at the links from my post to other posts, and looking at trackbacks to my post (or using the link: search limit applied to the URI of my post on a search engine) I can locate my post in its immediate “link neighbourhood”:
Now it might be that I want to track the posts that refer to posts that referred to my post (which is what the trackforward demo explored).
You might also be interested in seeing what else the posts that have referred to my original post have linked to:
Another possibility is tracking posts that refer to posts that I referred to:
It might be that one of those posts also refers to my post:
So what…. so I need to take a break now – more in a later post…
See also: Tweetbacks, a beta service that provides a trackback like service from tweets that reference a particular URL.
PS and also BackType and BackTweets