Plugaid will bring trackbacks to MySpace, Xanga
by Marshall Kirkpatrick on June 12, 2006

Plugaid is an innovative and easy way for bloggers using systems that don’t support automatic trackback discovery to show the conversations that their posts are a part of. The tool targets systems like MySpace, Xanga and Blogger.com. I think it will be very welcome there.

Plugaid was co-founded by a student from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology named Trent Kang. It’s currently in Alpha mode, collecting emails for interested future users. The creators have started a conversation that can be participated in for testing, as I’ve done at the bottom of this post.

It uses embeded flash to display participating blog posts discussing a particular post, with drop down excerpts and links to the full posts. The photo of each linking blogger is also displayed if available. Users must provide nothing more than a password that can be used to remove the link from the display if they wish to do so later.

In the sample below, I’ve clicked “participate,” entered a password and got a few lines of code to include in my post. That signifies that I’m participating in the conversation about the Plugaid demo, and other people who are participating as well should see a link to this post in their Plugaid box shortly. The links that appear can display full excerpts when you click the “more” button, where you’ll also see the linking URL and a button to visit that blog post. Right now the excerpts are all very short because there are just a few people writing very short test posts.

One downside may be that participation in a plugaid discussion doesn’t appear to provide a direct link in HTML to other posts in the conversation and thus doesn’t help with link love. I imagine this is not a big concern to many likely users, though.

The language used by Plugaid is a little unclear, as well, and could use some clarification.

It’s a simple tool, with no clear business model yet, but I think it could really catch on.

Comments

That’s a damn catchy logo, and I’m glad to see the name is related to the product. Not sure how well myspace/xanga users will adopt this service though, since few use myspace as a blog (Not sure about xanga, as I’ve never used it). I could definitely see this merging with cocomment.

 

Yes thanks for info ! i think i gone love it !

 

Marshall, thanks for the great writeup.
As you and Freshblog(above in the plugaid box) have pointed out,
the terms may need some clarifying. Maybe we should drop all the jargons except the “plugging” :-)
We promise to make the terms more friendly… Thanks for the advice!

 

Jimmy, thanks for your praise on our logo :-)
By the way, we think that MySpace and Xanga is a pretty cool place, and therefore there should be many things we can do there.
However, we’re not just aiming at MySpace or Xanga.
I’m sure that Plugaid will be useful not only for blogs without trackback support, but also for all the other blogs WITH trackback.

Trackback stays in one place, while Plugaid Box can go anywhere.

 

If you like the embedded character of plugaid, don’t miss Webride’s AJAX based inline forums (no invitation needed): http://webride.org/tools/website

Very soon (probably next week), we will allow for anonymous postings and hand over full moderation control for Webmasters.

Not only are the forums embedded, they are also directly connected to the Webride Community. Plus lots of more features :)

Cheers, Arash

 

I don’t get it. So I embed that huge Flash box in a blog post and people can then ping it?

Don’t most programs have trackback built in anyway? And the ones that don’t can always link to technorati or something…

 

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i have a good audio systems on my website http://car-audio.org.md

 

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