I was watching some clips of the Web 2.0 Expo on blip.tv, and I came across Matt Mullenweg’s speech on WordPress, and what he would like to see in the future of blogging. He pointed out that when you post, especially on WordPress.com, when people read your post all they have is the comments section, and possibly a chronological backwards/forwards post link, but that’s basically it for the reader. If they want to find out more on that given subject, they would have to search for the content.

On this blog it’s pretty much the same, you read the normally extremely short posts, and are left disappointed either with the quality of how i’ve explained things, or the fact that you want to read more about that given subject from another blog. I know I have comments, but they are hardly busy at the best of times (i think the average around here is about 0 comments per post). Also a recent addition is the “Possibly Related” section below each post, which I had to go through every damn post on here and tag to get working. But, I don’t usually write other posts expanding on posts prior to them, so they usually don’t help the reader at all.

What has been recently implemented on WordPress.com is the ability to display related posts on your blog, making it so that other people can find your posts from other blogs posting on the same subject, meaning that it is no longer restricted to that blog, but all of the blogs on WordPress.com. The part of the talk that really got me thinking was a related posts feature of the standalone WordPress.org software that got a load of everyone’s posts who are using the WordPress software to run their site, and show the most related posts below newly posted content. So, like related posts on my blog, but getting posts from every single WordPress blog who wanted it.

So, that also got me thinking. Is it actually possible? I mean, I was also watching Google’s Matt Cutts’ talk on web spam, and he seemed to make it clear that it was a majour problem for a search engine, and I’m sure it would be a massive problem for a blog feature like this. Although Akismet does a great job stopping spam comments, this would be a totally different matter as spammers try and get linked to on other blogs. A would a rating system help solve this problem? Blog Moderation?

Although it would be a very tricky thing to implement, i’m sure it would be a massively appreciated part of WordPress; I write my content for people like you to read, and globally related posts would make that an even more reachable goal.