Serendipity, or Applied Intelligence?

To help you get more value from my post­ings, I added the LinkWithin wid­get to my blogs today. This wid­get can auto­mat­i­cally sug­gest, for any new post, related sto­ries found else­where within the blog. I’m still get­ting a feel for what it con­sid­ers to be “related” — and am already chuck­ling at some of its whim­si­cal results.

What You See

At the bot­tom of each post, the LinkWithin wid­get dis­plays links and thumb­nails for up to 3 related sto­ries within my blog.

You’ll see the ben­e­fits of its “intel­li­gence” at the end of this and all other posts in this blog.

How It Works

LinkWithin chooses related sto­ries based on their title, tags and con­tent, accord­ing to the developer’s FAQ.

Hav­ing said that, I’ve found some of the choices to be quite amus­ing: it sees link­ages that a human edi­tor would never con­sider. Take a look at the post “Indi­ca­tors of Waste Heat” as an exam­ple (LinkWithin’s results appear at the bot­tom).

How did LinkWithin “see” the con­nec­tion between our cats’ heat-seek­ing behav­ior and a yoga retreat in Provence?

Well, it turns out the yoga retreat took place dur­ing a heat wave in south­ern France. There was no A/C in the yoga stu­dio or in the 16th cen­tury hotel where we stayed. Tem­per­a­tures hov­ered in the high 90s and above for more than a week.

LinkWithin must have detected words relat­ing to heat in both posts, even if their sub­ject mat­ter is largely unre­lated. Both posts were writ­ten with a some­what wry tone, although I doubt LinkWithin could detect that sub­tle aspect to the con­tent.

See what you think…