There are now little talk-bubbles attached to the articles here on the front page of ongoing; each one is a branch, via Technorati, to whoever out there might have pointed at the article it’s attached to. Which provokes a couple of observations and predictions.
First of all, it was ridiculously easy to put in, like maybe three lines of code.
My first cut slapped a bubble on every article, not just the first page. But that doesn’t work very well because Technorati is all about what’s happening right now, so the bubble goes nowhere on almost anything more than a few days old. The right thing to do would be to cobble together some code that talks to both the Technorati and Google Web Services and pulls together a unified take on what (if anything) is being said right now plus the backward-looking long view.
Also, it dawns on me that it wouldn’t be hard to stuff the bubble in the syndication feed.
So, is this something that Changes Everything? I don’t know; let’s run with it for a while and see what happens, the way we usually do on the Web.
