BEDFORD, VIRGINIA -- What if you could add one line of code to your blogging software and instantly get better information on what people think of your articles? What if it ran on all major blogging platforms, and worked on all major browsers? What if it was fully skinnable, and extensible enough to add custom functions for each article (like going to a contribution page, adding social tags, or recommending the article to your friends)?

How about if it was all free?

A small company in little Bedford, Virginia is answering those questions this week as they release blogging software batBack.

In an industry laden with buzzwords, batBack has plenty of them – AJAX, Web 2.0, JSON, XML, JAVASCRIPT, DOM, W3C, P3P. Behind it all, however, is a simple idea: most bloggers would like extra stuff for their blogs without having to become programmers, and most readers would like help in figuring out which articles are worth taking the time to read and which aren’t without taking the time to read them.

Once the one-minute installation is over, beside each article title appears a rating bar describing what the readers think of the article. Under each article is a voting button that drops down a box to provide feedback to the blogger. The rest of the blogging software and user experience works as normal, and there is no other installation or maintenance tasks involved. Ranking and other actions take just a few seconds and don’t involve changing pages or interrupting the user reading experience.

The extensibility of the program is already generating interest by philanthropies.

“A charity can run blogging articles describing various micro-ventures: to relieve poverty, provide infrastructure, or supply IT equipment to impoverished communities,” Markham explains, “and the readers can rate each effort in terms of urgency, importance, or impact. This lets ‘virtual charities’ organize and make a difference in a way that’s never happened before.”

Not only can the software be installed by the blogger, it is also possible to intercept web pages and add links for the software through hardware. Markham describes other uses for an article ranking system that requires no installation: intelligence agencies could intercept news articles gaining an in-house information prioritization system for zero cost. Corporations that accumulate lots of information on the web can use batBack as a filter and tagging tool for incoming information. Fraternities, schools, clubs, or clans can use the software to keep a running “best of” list of articles from contributors.

“I love blogging, but it is so easy to get a thousand new stories a day to read, and nobody has time for that. What we need is some universal, cross-provider way of ranking blog content so that we only take time to read the articles that we’re going to like. This is social bookmarking 2.0,” Markham explains, “we’re taking some really good ideas on the web right now and seeing where the next level is. It’s an exciting product. Hopefully it will make a positive difference.”

batBack is patent-pending at the United States Patent Office.



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