It seems logical that WordPress.com would see value in having its users promote their blogs with the greatest of ease, thereby increasing traffic, and everything that follows from that. I have to admit, they do make a blogger pretty comfortable, but there’s always room for growth and improvement.
One feature that I think could be fairly simple to implement, and immensely useful to the entire community is “Post Widgets”. Non-wordpress users don’t know this, but the stuff that’s on the sidebar of this blog is created using a little drag-n-drop interface. It’s very nice, and I’ve never seen it explode or do anything wacky, which is great. What I’d like, though, is the same interface that will let us drag little bits around to customize how posts work on our blogs.
For example, I add Technorati tags and social bookmarking links to every post, using bookmarklets I downloaded. Every time I post, I have to click on these two bookmarklets and enter in a bit of text, then press enter, and then cut-n-paste the resulting code into my post. Meanwhile, Blogger users can just paste some CSS into their theme *one time* and be done with it. Of course, I had much, much bigger issues with Blogger, so I’m not going back just to save myself 2 clicks per post.
So, the way it would work is just like the sidebar widgets, but instead of a sidebar drag-n-drop interface, we’d need one for the posts. Included could be, of course, a “WordPress tags” widget, a social bookmarking widget, and widgets that would let us include/exclude other cool things like maybe a ‘glossary’ widget that would automatically highlight words for which there is a glossary entry or something. You could really come up with a good number of useful things you can do with each blog post. I suppose the hold up here would be that launching such a service would be rather expensive, computationally speaking. Imagine what happens when 300,000 blogs decide they want social bookmarking icons on the bottom of every post entry!
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