Ben Hammersley (whose Weblogs Hacks book is now available for pre-order on Amazon) is hacking like crazy on loosely joining his blog to the bewildering array of services that can be programatically accessed.
For starters, every post has its own RSS feed, whence the comments for that post are syndicated. Add to that a "contemporania" block of text associated with each post that records the top British headlines, the weather in various cities, the top single on the UK charts, and the number of inbound links to Ben at the moment that his post was saved.
Now he's added a preview of the kind of functionality you can get with the as-yet-private API for Technorati, David Sifry's brilliant blogmining tool. In Ben's experimental implementation (the first such ever), when he links to another blog, it creates "mouseover text" (a little bar of text that pops up if you hover your cursor over the link) with the current number of inbound blogs connected to the blog he's just linked to. All of this stuff will be in Ben's book — but I want it for Boing Boing now!
