Perspectives

Writing a blog is more than writing. It is an art. A way of disseminating valuable information. Although blogging is a lot of fun, the little quirks involved tends to get on to my nerves sometimes. One of those overheads is finding what terms might be alien to your reader and creating link-offs, just in case the reader wants to know a bit more on what you are talking about. But, linking off is at core of the web and it must be harnessed. Web exists because of it’s hyper-links.

To create outlinks, this is what I generally do: Go search for that term in Google/Yahoo. Click on a few links and find what is appropriate. And then copy and paste the link over to the term I just blocked. In many cases, I have found the first link just works fine.

In some cases, I just create a link over to wikipedia and type out the query term hoping that the wiki entry will exist. And it does. For instance, for the above wikipedia hyperlink, I just typed “wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia” (Seems like this is the web2.0 version of your recursive shell command “man man”).

Now, what if I could do the same thing without having to go to either google or type the wiki url? So, the idea is, I block a text and then either click “make wiki url” or “I am feeling lucky” and get done with it. Altough you can write this up as a plugin quite easily for wordpress or typepad, The only way it seems possible for LJ or blogger is Greasemonkey.

What do you think? Do you have time to do this ? Let me know.