Wed
17 Nov 2004
8:52 pm
Steal this Feedster Developer Contest Idea
Posted by shimon under computers/blogging , computers/search , shimon/my brilliant ideasFeedster is giving away 12 iPod minis in a developer (and writer) contest. Here's an idea for a feedster-powered service that would be really cool, but I don't have the time to implement myself.
Find Related Blog Posts with Feedster Searches and Statistics
If your blog has statistics (all frassle users do now, thanks to Josh) you probably enjoy learning what search queries bring users to your site. You might even sometimes try looking at those search results yourself. Perhaps you find that people are coming up with some pretty interesting search queries, and those websites appearing next to yours in the results are worth reading.
There is no need for this to be a manual process.
- Your blog software records what search terms lead viewers to a given post. Perhaps for this post, a day's queries might be "free ipod mini" and "feedster contest".
- Every night, your blog goes to feedster and records the top 10 results for each of those search terms.
- If a given blog posts appears as a result for more than one of the search queries, it is ranked as especially relevant.
- Related posts on other blogs are automatically displayed with your post. Best of all, they're found based on what people have actually been looking for.
I think this would make an excellent plugin for a blog publishing system. I'm not certain it would actually produce useful information, but it's probably worth trying.
(Incidentally, I first thought of automating this while chatting on the phone with Bill Ives a few months ago. I'm not sure how we got onto the topic, but he told me how he sometimes finds useful material in this manner.)
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