New Toy: Historyscape
Photo (cc) the Mainzelmann
There’s a new toy on the site Historyscape.
Digg is the major news site for the sciences, but there’s no equivalent for archaeology, history and classics. If you haven’t seen it, Digg asks people to find webpages they like and then submit them to its database. If you browse the Digg site and find a story you like you can digg it and that adds a vote to it. The stories with the most votes get shown on the front page, and then fade with time. The whole thing is a way of being able to see what’s popular with technology buffs at any time.
Netscape is a similar site, but it takes stories about anything. What people do is they tag stories, so if you want to see what’s popular in history you can visit the History tag. If you prefer archaeology you can read the Archaeology tag. At the time of writing even stories with just one vote can be quite prominent. This suggests to me that Netscape could be a good tool for history bloggers. If you’ve written something you want to push, then submitting it to Netscape could be a good idea if other history blog audiences are aware that the site is being used. Not only is the story visible to history bloggers using Netscape, it’s visible to anyone using Netscape. Looking at the front page, it seems that the number of votes required to be big news is quite low. A healthy history blogging community would probably push up interesting stories on a regular basis. You could also have a cabal working, but this would be a Bad Idea in the long run as it would lead to a ban for spamming.
The other really useful thing about Netscape is that their tag pages have RSS feeds. If you have a weblog, you can incorporate these into your layout. The only drawback is that I haven’t found a way to combine feeds from tags on site, so using Netscape’s feeds you can only show stories tagged with one specific tag. This is what the Historyscape thing I’ve been playing with this weekend is. Essentially the feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/Historyscape is a feed of all the stories active on the tags Ancient, Ancient History, Archaeology and History ordered by votes. It’s what I’m using to create the news page, so if you want to get a link from my site submitting a story to Netscape would probably be the easiest way to do it.
If you want to get the Historyscape stories on your own weblog then you can use an RSS to Javascript service or one of the RSS widget sites.
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