The popular blog host WordPress.com has introduced a new ‘like’ feature, in an effort to make the platform interactive and to help users keep a tab on favourable feedback from their peers.
A ‘like’ button will be present at the end of every blog post, similar to the feature on social networking site, Facebook. If a viewer ‘likes’ a post, the author can browse through the blog profile of the viewer. This is designed to promote interaction between bloggers who share similar ideas and interests.
Users can reblog (the process of filtering and republishing content from another blog) an entry he/she ‘likes’, adding comments to the original entry before republishing to achieve higher readership.
WordPress.com also provides for the user to keep track of all the posts he/she ‘likes’.
The new feature will be of keen interest to bloggers who use WordPress.com, many of whom are already familiar with the ‘like’ option through Facebook. Jayashree Arunachalam, an avid blogger on WordPress.com, welcomes the new element but sees merit in the old method of commenting. “Reblogging a post I ‘like’ is useful. So is the option of viewing all the posts I have ‘liked’, quite similar to starring mails on Gmail. But I'd rather a reader left a comment actually critiquing or relating to something I write. I’m glad the comment option is still available,” she says.
The blog host WordPress.com opened for use in November 2005, and boasts of 10.9 million individual blogs (as on April 2010). It uses WordPress – an open source software - as a tool to publish content.
