Plugaid is an innovative and easy way for bloggers using systems that don’t support automatic trackback discovery to show the conversations that their posts are a part of. The tool targets systems like MySpace, Xanga and Blogger.com. I think it will be very welcome there.
Plugaid was co-founded by a student from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology named Trent Kang. It’s currently in Alpha mode, collecting emails for interested future users. The creators have started a conversation that can be participated in for testing, as I’ve done at the bottom of this post.
It uses embeded flash to display participating blog posts discussing a particular post, with drop down excerpts and links to the full posts. The photo of each linking blogger is also displayed if available. Users must provide nothing more than a password that can be used to remove the link from the display if they wish to do so later.
In the sample below, I’ve clicked “participate,” entered a password and got a few lines of code to include in my post. That signifies that I’m participating in the conversation about the Plugaid demo, and other people who are participating as well should see a link to this post in their Plugaid box shortly. The links that appear can display full excerpts when you click the “more” button, where you’ll also see the linking URL and a button to visit that blog post. Right now the excerpts are all very short because there are just a few people writing very short test posts.
One downside may be that participation in a plugaid discussion doesn’t appear to provide a direct link in HTML to other posts in the conversation and thus doesn’t help with link love. I imagine this is not a big concern to many likely users, though.
The language used by Plugaid is a little unclear, as well, and could use some clarification.
It’s a simple tool, with no clear business model yet, but I think it could really catch on.