Tom Coates makes an important point: “[The permalink] may seem like a trivial piece of functionality now, but it was effectively the device that turned weblogs from an ease-of-publishing phenomenon into a conversational mess of overlapping communities. For the first time it became relatively easy to gesture directly at a highly specific post on someone else’s site and talk about it. Discussion emerged. Chat emerged. And – as a result – friendships emerged or became more entrenched. The permalink was the first – and most successful – attempt to build bridges between weblogs.”
It may seem like a trivial idea now, but it was undoubtedly this simple concept which transformed publishing. The permalink is also at the heart of our belief that blog post search needs to focus not on the page but on the post. If we recognise the granularity of the blog as the post and the permalink as its identifier, then there is a lot we can do on the analysis front.
