WOMBlink

I have to agree with Catalogablog that the name is not so good - the name conjures up associations with umbilical cords for me. And I never thought I'd be writing about them here.

According to the site, it should be pronounced WOM-blink, rather than womb-link. Word-of-mouth-blog-link.

The concept sounds interesting. So let's try it out...

Blog This

WOMBLINK provided by RSS4Lib

This link should give the user a snippet of html to include in their blog post about this page. It is being promoted as something for libraries to include on their websites, press-releases other html-enabled resources to encourage users to spread the good word about the library, its services and events.

Comments

Peta said…
Limitations? Well if you are going to use it in your blog posts, the link that is created will depend on which page the user is visiting when they use the WOM-Blink. Could be the 'home' page, could be the individual post's page, could be the archive page.

But for content that only displays on a static page, or at least a stable generated URL it should be work fine.

What would be a nice enhancement for libraries who want to use it is to be able to have a customised womblink page where the snippet is made available.

But I think there must be a simple way to provide this kind of thing directly from a library's website without having to use an external site.
Anonymous said…
Hi, Peta. Thanks for the suggetions. You're not the only person to note the name; it never occured to me, frankly, as I had been pronouncing it my head as "WOM-blink", emphasizing the WOM. But your point is well taken -- watch for at a minium a typographical change to emphasize the WOM.

I'm curious about the kinds of customization you'd find useful on a library-specific womblink page -- what would like to see, beyond the (now-optional) site logo?
Peta said…
Ken,
I was thinking about the page that appears when a user clicks on Blog This. It opens a page on the WOMblink site, which is clearly not the library's own site. If this could be customised to emphasize the Library itself rather than WOMblink, that would be cool. Of course you'd still want to make it clear that this was a service being provided by WOMblink.

I was thinking that the Library could choose a colour scheme, font etc or specify a css and the WOMblink stuff could be given less prominence at the bottom of the page.

Or what if the snippet could be displayed within the Library's own website. A bit like Google's CSE search results can be embedded within a page.

Over at librariesinteract.info we did that.. Australian Blog Search. Users are then not taken away from our site until they choose a search result to follow.
Anonymous said…
Peta,

Thanks for the suggestions. Your points about keeping the library's identity on I'll think about what I can do that preserves library site identity better yet keeps the creation process simple for library site owners.

Ken