Anil Dash has a unique idea (via Steve Rubel), though I’m not sure if it’ll take off or not — embedded blog posts.
Anil figures that if people are always embeddeding photos and videos, why not let them embed the text of blog posts too? It seems like it might be a good idea.
The main problem I see is this:
- A lot of bloggers prefer to link and comment about other posts (like I do) and wouldn’t want to embed the full post.
- A lot of other bloggers have a hard time embedding code due to WYSIWYG editors and their lack of HTML knowledge.
There’s still a lot of bloggers left in the middle, so this idea still might find a big audience. Even if it doesn’t end up becoming popular, you’ve gotta give Anil some credit for a very creative idea.
Another potential problem stems from the fact that the blog content you embed is still live. If the author updates it on their end, it automatically updates on your site. For many things, that’d be great! However, if the author decides to put up a XXX image instead, you’ve got problems.
As a blogger, is this something you could see yourself using — either offering embedded code of your posts, or embedding other posts in your site?
While at first this sounds like a great idea, what about blockquoting – isn’t that good enough. Or what about using the Clipmarks, which pretty much allows you to post their entry and let’s you blog about it in one swoop. I think it makes great sense for some people to be able to offer some text as embeddable, like the text from a white paper, or even designating a few graphs, but I don’t know about all the text. However, this could present some opportunities for creating a large number of backlinks if you have a very popular blogpost that people want to embed – would that create the duplicate content problem?
Interesting, although it doesn’t seem like people have much of a problem snagging content now, even just through RSS. The “honest” way to do it is with block quoting, as Shawn says.
Clipmarks looks interesting too, and I’ve never checked it out before.
Anil’s idea is interesting, but the Java links won’t get picked up anyway, so it’s more of a traffic and awareness generator than a backlink tool, right? I didn’t try it, but looking at it, it appears to be the case.
So, if someone likes your post, and may otherwise blockquote and text link to you, might you be shooting yourself in the foot to use a script?