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.
