Reblog Plugin For Wordpress / MoveableType
All blogs should offer a reblog feature. Fred Wilson wrote a post on Newcritics about the power of the Tumblr reblog button. You should click through and read it. I agree with Fred that reblogging is an interesting development for media sharing on the web. This comment in particular caught my attention:
You have to have a tumblog on Tumblr to be able to use the reblog button. Which limits its ubiquity and I think that should change. I hope it will.
I’m surprised someone hasn’t created a plugin for the other major blogging platforms (Wordpress, SixApart, etc) that mimics the Tumblr reblog button. Maybe someone has and it just hasn’t gained traction. It seems to me that the technical capability exists today. Flickr, for example, has a “blog this” button on every photo page that functions similar to a reblog. The first time you click “blog this” on Flickr, a window pops up asking you to login to the blogging software you use (they currently support a half a dozen of the popular blogging tools). From that point on, anytime you click “blog this”, a preformatted post is created on your blog including the image you reblogged from Flickr along with attribution links back to the photo page on Flickr. You can add your own commentary to the post, just as many people do when reblogging from Tumblr.
I’m assuming that a plugin developer could create a feature like this using public API’s from Wordpress and the other blogging tool companies. Blog publishers would have an incentive to add the plugin as it would encourage other sites to link back to them and increase their PageRank. I would certainly consider adding the button to my Tumblr if it meant friends using other tools could reblog my posts. The plugin developer could even track all the reblogs and feature the most popular ones on a separate site as a Techmeme / Digg type of zeitgeist.
Does this already exist? If not, why? Flickr has been offering it for years, no?
