I very quietly added Spotback Widgets to my site yesterday which I read about first on TechCrunch. I didn’t announce it as I wanted to see if anyone noticed. The Spotback Widget service is still in beta, but I think it looks very promising.
The Spotback Widget allows readers to rate and add their own tags to each post. The highest rated posts and most common tags are displayed for all to see in a sidebar widget, but also in a nifty popup available within each post. I’m hoping that this tool encourages readers to find more posts and will also new readers uncover some of my older posts.
Finding a better way to direct users to my old posts is probably the number one blogging issue I want to find a solution to. I’ve written nearly 1500 posts over the last 2 years, and given that I’ve been posting about the same topics over this time most of these posts would probably be of interest to most new readers. Although I’m not expecting every new visitor to read all 1500 pages (although that would be nice!), it’d be nice if the site would ‘bubble up’ more of the ones that they would find interesting.
To signup for the Spotback beta is simple. All you have to do is fire off an email – I got a reply within 24 hours with installation instructions. Another site using the Spotback Widget is CyberNet.
I put this on to my blog couple of weeks ago. initially the script loading used to block the page rendering which I am sure was fixed early this week.
I don’t know really…!
and JS to load, and putting this widget, will make things wrose!
You are already having a lot of plugins, Ads…and more ads
At least with my connection :s
I saw this yesterday but my connection was a little slow so I just came back today. It looks like a great addition. The ability to rate and add tags definitely encourages readers to participate. I think I’ll try this out as soon as my connection normalizes.
I like the look of the plug-in and dig the idea behind it… I hope you will write a follow-up soon to see if it actually encourages folks to read your older posts… will you be watching the traffic on the older posts?
I think it does look pretty cool and doesn’t seem to be slowing the pages down in it’s general operation for me – if it had caused the entire page to re-load to rate, i wouldn’t have bothered myself, but given it’s self-contained, i’m much more inclined to use it.
Will be interesting to see how you find it’s working in a week or two – depending how it goes, i may take a look at it myself.
Hey guys nice to see more sites adding the Spotback widgets. I also installed it on The Plugg, and after two weeks I think it’s safe to say that our pageviews doubled and tripled. I see you didn’t install the little top story box on the sidebar, you should, it really draws attention.
It is quite good, but what is the effect on the load time of your page??
I don’t think it has had a noticeable impact.
I’m going to do a followup post this week about how it’s performed.
That’s great, look forward to your post on it. I’m planning on signing up as well