Highway 61

Links with Your Coffee

March 2, 2008 at 5:16 pm | Posted in Coffee links, Matthew Hurst, meta | 2 Comments
Tags: Blogroll, del.icio.us, google reader, new site, social, TiRC

Every week we read over 100 local bloggers and check up on local sites so we can keep up on the down low, and then we share the best posts with a recurring feature we can Links with Your Coffee.  From the very start these coffee links have been part of our civic duty; We consider this an important part of building our community online, and it also helps us cover stories for our audience that is outside the niche of what we like to write about.

But this week we’d like to invite our readers to participate in an experiment, a sort of public beta testing of a feature we’re hoping to add as it’s own page on the new site.  This feature takes some time to put together, so we’ve experimented with auto-blog posting which turned out to be a little robotic of a read.  We also have trouble adding friends of ours to the blogroll, since every time we add another blog it detracts from the attention we think every member of our blogroll deserves; so when Jeff Kopp asked us to add TiRC to the roll, even we thought it was already in the mix. 

We think this might be a good compromise, in which we can use Google Reader to share some of the stories and news we think our readers would want to know about as we read them everyday.  And we can use this as a sort of social bookmarking if anyone wants to suggest a story to share with other readers (if you’re using google reader yourself that is).  With the stories in one frame of the page, we can use the other gutter to display an updated blogroll divided into relevant categories. 

You can think of it sort of as Social Blogrolling, and we’d love to hear your thoughts about using this feature.  We asked Archy about adding this to the new site, and they said it was alright.