Developments and capabilities that would be useful for this blog

I would like to troll software tools that tell me about who is reading what on Law Department Management. During the past year I have shared what I have learned about the plumbing of this blawg (See my posts of Feb. 16, 2008: top referring domains; Feb. 24, 2008: information architecture; and Feb. 25, 2008: thoughts on this blog’s third anniversary.) and will continue to do so. Perhaps readers will point me in the direction of other tools.

My hope is to react more often to material posted on other blogs (See my post of Feb. 20, 2008: law-department related blogs.). I try to link to other blogs but find it hard to locate eligible material. Some people who blog rely heavily on quick cites to other sources: “For an update on salaries and jobs in-house, visit InHouse Blog of Geoff Gussis.” Other bloggers pick up an idea from a source and riff on it, briefly or extensively, as they add their own perspective. All the reading I do provides me with an endless stream of ideas to blog on (See my post of Nov. 13, 2007: my leading sources.). A third style of blogging means you write from scratch, and creates original material. I do a fair amount of the latter, based on my consulting projects.

What I wish I could unleash is collaborative filtering: readers would link posts to other posts or, like Amazon, I could show that if someone reads a given post they are likely to read another post. Every now and then I ask vendors of concept search software whether they can help on that front. It would also be neat if there were a way for readers to rate posts and for me to know how many times a given post is emailed to someone.

Finally, it would be illuminating if each post about a specific law department could include the size of the department, its industry, and a date range for the practice under discussion. Those explicit facts or metadata would enable searches by size of department, by industry and by period.