Mathemagenic

Olaf Brugman writes in Debunking Waypath about his far-from-perfect experiences of finding relevant weblogs via subscription to RSS feed of Waypath search results. My experiences with RSS subscription are similar (noise/signal ratio is comparable with general search), but I'd like to point out that my enthusiasm about Waypath comes from using Waypath plug-in, which somehow works better.

Waypath plug-in finds and shows weblog posts connected to your post. For me the main value of it is in finding posts related to my writing outside of my "regularly read" circle of weblogs.

This plug-in is not perfect as:

• results are better for longer posts, so there is almost nothing to expect for short posts
• sometimes it links to weblogs I read, so there is noting new (but it's still interesting)
• it's a rare case if all of three links shown are relevant

Still, there are cases when I'm really happy with it. Two recent examples:

For my Technorati+TrackBack for tracking who links to a post Waypath plug-in links to Burningbird: Trackback for the Non-Trackback Enabled and magpiebrain: Trackbacks considered harmful?

For my Is it difficult to 'catch up' with a weblog? it links to Read/Write Web: Tracking conversations with Wikis and Common Craft - Online Communication Planning: Advice on Professional Weblogs

2 out of 3 relevant (for me) posts from weblogs I don't read regularly.

I've got suggestions for my question about tracking who links to a post: subscribe to links to my weblog via RSS feed from Technorati, Waypath and Blogdex. This is not what I want. Quick morning look at Technorati is enough for my "ego-blog-tracking" purposes (I know that I can do it via RSS, I just don't see a value of paying money to get something in real-time if I need once a day :).

I want: post-specific links (who links to the post X) and not page-specific or weblog-specific links AND automatic display of those links (a-la TrackBacks) next to the post.

I expect that it can help blog readers to find follow-ups for posts that they found interesting without having to look at all links to my weblog. This is the same difference as subscribing to comment notification for a post (what readers are likely to want) vs. subscribing to all weblog comments notification (what bloggers do).