Proposal for a new blog entry element: source.
After tagging became a big deal, every blog, video, mp3 on the internet needed a folksonomy of tag keywords attached. One cool thing though was that tags already had a ready-made data format in RSS.
So many blog entries published are actually reposts, commenting on another story, but there’s no easy way to discover within a blog post what is the ‘parent’ post and what are just references or random links.
It would be so nice if people would add a source element to their rss feeds or identify sources through a microformat, as it would allow for a lot of good analysis of where things start and how they become popular. It would also enhance everyone’s posts, as blog posting tools could grab the chain of reposts and append that automatically to new posts, ala tumblr.
From an SEO perspective, this would be of great benefit for all involved, more links means more Google juice.
The concept is somewhat similar to trackbacks, which unfortunately don’t have a machine-readable format, and are kind of annoying to use.
