Sifry's Alerts

Add Real-time Link Counts to your blog posts

Ever wanted to be able to show your readers the reactions from around the blogosphere on your blog posts? Something that is updated live, whenever someone links to you, that you can integrate on your blog, just like Comments and Trackbacks, but without the spam (well, at least most of it)?

We just launched a widget for you. It's called the Technorati Link Counter Widget, and you can see it running on my blog (check the bottom of this post in the comments and trackbacks section) or on other bloggers' blogs, like Hugh MacLeod's Gaping Void, Paolo Valdemarin's weblog, and Jeff Veen's blog. Right now, you have to be a bit technical in order to install it - you need to be able to edit your templates, but if you can do that, It's easy to install. If you use one of the larger blog publishing tools like Movable Type, Wordpress (.org only, so far no support for .com), blogger, or Typepad, just cut and paste the code from the linkcount page into your index and post templates.

We've been talking to the different tool vendors about getting this installed as an easy option for non-technical users, but in my experience, the thing that they react to the fastest is requests from their users! So if you want this on your blog, let your tool vendor know!

It's been pretty exciting to see the early reaction in the blogosphere, and we've been getting a lot of great feedback from people. Please leave your feedback in comments here, or even better, write a post about it, and link to this entry, your reaction will show up in my link count widget at the bottom of this post. Here's the post on the Technorati weblog with a list of a bunch of other people who have installed the widget to give you some ideas as well...

Technorati Tags: beta, blogging, blogosphere, blogsearch, featurerequest, linkcount, search engine, technorati, widget