One of the benefits of having so many blogs is we can experiment across a statistically relevant number of blogs and visitors to test out how different changes to aspects of the blog works.
For example the way we display titles on permalink pages, with the post name first and the blog name second, is the result of testing and we found that having the post name first has an impact on blog traffic, mostly from places like search engines that show the page title as part of the results.
Anyway, one of the places we think is pretty under-used on our themes is the spot under the post and above the comments. It makes sense, when someone is done with your post they’re probably looking for someplace else to go. We were brainstorming some ideas of what to put there, here’s what we have so far:
- Related posts
- Ads (your ads)
- Blogroll or avatars
- Popular posts
- Random same-blog posts
- Author profile
Of those, “related posts” is the most exciting but also the most difficult, but probably the one we’ll try to tackle first.
However I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff we haven’t even imagined yet. So… what would you be interested in having under your post on the permalink (single post) page?
WordPress.com News 
I want RSS feeds (customizable)!
I kind of like the Ads idea, its about time we have that up!
related posts and popular posts would be nice to see
In order of preference:
1. Related post
2. Ads/affiliate links
the first two: Related posts and Ads!
There are some themes (or at least one, PressRow) that do not even display the name of the author. Shouldn’t that be tackled before?
Hope you do not mind I leaving my comments here. I like sharing thoughts about this. Hehe..
* Related posts :- This also sounds interesting. However, how ‘related’ of the ‘Related Posts?’ Same tags?
*
Ads:- If there will have to be any ads, I would request that to be at the bottom of the whole page.* Blogroll or avatars :- Not sure what this is about.
*
Popular posts:- I think you have offered this on our Dashboard page.*
Random same-blog posts:- This duplicates what you have on the top of the page.*
Author profile:- If this will be linked to our WP profile page, I personally do not think we have put much information there.Hmm.. how about.. showing the link to the page/ blog in WP that the author of the page has just recently visited? This may link to the same interests, I guess.
..
Really like the way WP think OUT LOUD though we know you guys are working really hard on improve this lovely place 🙂
Thanks to the WP team!
yeah, having “related posts” below a post would be quite good feature to have! I’ll vote for it above all other listed options! 🙂
Ads yes!?
I vote for “Related Posts” with a 25 word preview for each related post.
I hope whatever you choose we can choose to turn it on and off on our end.
related post under same label?
I’d go with related posts. Adding those manually were a pain. It would be awesome if you had a dropdown menu when you write a post where you can filter your posts by category and then select the particular post(s) you want to put.
Even if the “related posts” feature only allowed us to enter such posts manually, it’d still be great.
Related posts is brilliant. I’ve actually added a couple to the end of a few of my posts. Great minds think alike!
It would be good if I had the option to just click on a box or boxes as an editing feature, allowing me to choose which of my posts to include as a related post for that particular one.
Looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with.
Thanks!
Sounds good, lets try it.
Related same-blog posts would be great =)
related posts would be perfect… or ads 🙂
Mmmn… I would like Related posts or Ads.
I think that “related posts” is very useful for the visitors and readers because they can see related posts.
Also I believe that the announcements can attract many users of other platforms.
“Random same-blog posts” would be very well in the Sidebar.
Pardon my terrible English.
Greetings.
—-
A mí me gustaría Related Post o Ads (Con ADS os referís a anuncios ¿no? En el texto en inglés he dado por hecho que sí, espero no haberme equivocado)
Yo creo que Related Post es muy útil para los visitantes y lectores porque pueden ver posts relacionados con el que están leyendo y así se aumenta la estancia y lectura en el blog.
También creo que los Ads (si es que son anuncios) pueden atraer a muchos usuarios de otras plataformas en las que sí se permiten Ads y no quieren pagar servidores y quieren usar WordPress.
Random same-blog posts estaría muy bien en la barra lateral.
Un saludo ^.^
Did you say ads? [:O]
1.) Related posts would be great
2.) Random Posts
Popular Posts, we have a widget, so what’s the need again?
Not Ads.
Just do not put ads please .Other than that I will appreciate some better tagging function and the option for related posts.
Firstly, this is a very well timed user-survey.
I do believe that “related posts” would be of very much importance at that respective slot. Moreover, it gives the visitor an overview of what the Blogger has to say on related aspects of the same subject. This in turn keeps the online audience longer on a said web blog.
The second Option would certainly be Ads. Those which are related to the subject of the post. But since WordPress doesn’t allow Google Adsense, I wonder how can one go about doing this?
Blogroll or avatars – There’s no suitable place for this section, than the sidebar itself.
Popular posts – Again, most would like this at the Sidebar. But its a good option to place them below the comments in this format Post> Related Posts> Comments> Popular Posts.
Random same-blog posts – Nah! This is mainly for a visitor whose looking for pass his/her time. But, you never know, one may come across a very interesting random post. But, I don’t think this shoul be placed before the comments.
Author profile – Yes! But who has a genuine Author Profile, if any?
I hope my suggestions helps in improving this wonderful Blogging platform called WordPress.
I think of popular posts, because statistic reasons, perhaps…
cooool
your pages or your other blogs, I think it will in crease the traffic to your other posts also,
I have tried and put my other blogs link in sidebar and it increased the traffic to the other blogs in a rate of 40% of the visitors,
so what about if we put it under the post?????
plz reply for your opinion
What about a sort of reader control box, with options to e-mail the post, subscribe to feed, view the author’s profile and read related posts? This might give the reader a feeling of greater interaction with the blog. Another possibility would be customizable text that bloggers could use as a signature, or even a ‘thank you for reading’ message.
I just think it’s cool that you all are this involved in figuring out better uses of space – I hadn’t noticed the post title text on permalink pages until reading about it here, but I think that’s a great idea (and it looks more logical, too)!
Related Posts idea is really good one.
I guess Ads will be only provided to paid members of wordpress.com …. if not, now that will be greatly appreciated. 🙂
the last four ideas are mediocre at best. these things have been in taken care of already in the side bar and the about-page (if you say most people rarely use about-page, then they are not serious bloggers. all serious bloggers have a proper about-page) .. and avatars would increase the page loading time.
Ads is a nice idea.
The best idea seems to be Related-Post, but if you just update the category hyper-link and point to the same blogs’ posts rather then all wordpress posts of the same category, it would be better. if I am generally seeing the photographs taken by one blogger, I would not like to be taken on all photographs on wordpress when I click on the category link below the post title.
another idea could be add a widget that says “Add this page to”, and you can provide various sites like delicious, furl, reddit …
I like the idea. My preference order would be:
1. Related posts
2. Popular posts
3. Random same-blog posts
4. Author profile
I’m, personaly, not interested about the other possible options.
Thanks for your amazing work!. WordPress.com is day by day the best place for bloggin’.
The related posts thing is the one i’am waiting for 😉
P.S. I nearly forgot: if you turn these things into ‘permalink widgets’, you not only create a new class of widget, you leave open the option to turn all of the ideas you mention above into eventual widgets 🙂
*puts on thinking cap*
1. Links to put the post on 3rd party sites such as Digg,Reddit,Technorati,Furl etc
2. Author’s Mood/currently-listening-to etc
3. Something on the lines of “4 people have linked to this post” or “7 people found this comment useful”
I’m sure people will come up with tons of other nifty ideas. Choose the best and emanwhile, we’ll be waiting with crossed fingers to see what gets ‘under our posts’
Ciao
“Related Post” containing other blog’s posts.
Post Statistics – Click / visits for that post
number of unique hits to the article/ post so far?
I like the idea of related posts… perhaps it can be done more easily by listing the most recent entries have been labeled with the same category? So, for example, if someone has labeled the current post as “Politics”, then the widget can display 3 of the latest posts on Politics. In addition, you can have another widget that displays links to posts from around WordPress that have the same tag, if the author so wishes. I imagine that might be one way to do it?
The only difficulty is with authors who are a bit ‘tag-happy’… so maybe you could incorporate some kind of selection system on the post page, where the author can select which (if any) of the tags they wish to have related links displayed (bad grammar?).
I hope that made sense!
I would totally vote for “Related Posts” cuz often I find myself physically typing out instructions to my readers to visit related posts on the topic. Perhaps, popular posts might be a good bet too.
But whatever you guys try out and come with, it will be greatly appreciated. Love you fellas at WordPress! 🙂
related posts + profile( i think profile page also needs some more stuff)
Related posts would be nice alright, especially if we can modify the related posts and not rely completely on the ingenuity of WordPress!
Related posts, definitely!
Thanks in advance. 😉
Sure ‘related posts’ is great idea. But the others of your list is not so attractive. Because one can get them by widgets. Except ads, I think.
I thought out and the bottom line is:
1. Related posts
2. Post stats (hits or graph)
3. Posts with the same tags
Nevertheless you do a good job. Thx.
What about rating?
And, wouldn’t it be cool if the “related posts” aren’t limited to our own blog posts?
yes!!!
Big spammy ads … no wait … bad idea.
I love the related posts plugin and it would be even cooler if you had one that somehow fused related, popular and random – a customizeable widget??
I’d love a related posts spot there. I’ve been inventing my own things to put in that spot, and so far my favorite is similar to a related posts button. You can check it out at http://hearingtest.wordpress.com
It would be most useful to be able to put links to different bookmarking sites along the bottom, just as text. For things like seedvine, delicious, reddit etc..
It would also be super if we could put technorati tags in the metadata instead of the post itself.
You guys rock for thinking of that spot! That’s been my most troublesome spot.
I definitely would have “related posts” and if you make it possible I’ll try it right away. Thanks for your great work.
“tag this post” icons (delicious etc.) might be nice.
Definately a related post field
Related posts from same categories or with similar keywords sounds good enough. I’m not sure about ads, tho…
‘Related posts’ sounds really good!
Links to the RSS Feeds and Social Bookmarks (‘Share This’) would be fine also.
Related Posts is a gr8 idea but are u really serious about those Ads things
i mean on wordpress.com hosted blogs
All of these are good ideas:
* Related posts
* Ads
* Blogroll or avatars
* Popular posts
* Random same-blog posts
* Author profile
Why not give us the option of doing any of the above, or none at all!
Peter
To be honest, I think you’ve nailed it with the “related posts” idea. That would be excellent – I can’t think of a better use of the space.
this is so good: Related posts!
Ads of our own choice, of course it will be great if we can earn part of the revenue… 🙂
In order of preference:
1) Related posts
2) Random same-blog posts
3) The rest..
I like the idea of related posts.
Phil
Related posts.
Why don’t yo make these kind of posts a poll, instead of just inviting comments? 🙂
Related posts, definitely.
Couldn’t you extend the tags feature to cover related posts?
What would be in the author profile?
This may be more related to comments, but maybe there could be some little comment buttons. Kinda like they have on Yelp’s compliments. So if people want to let you know your post is funny or useful or whatever and they dont feel like leaving a full comment they can just click a little button.
Also some kind of author profile/signature would be cool!
I would go with related posts because I normally look there to see if there’s anything else useful to read. My second choice would be popular posts.
I would definitely be interested in having the author’s name show up on all posts, whether on the main blog page, or on the single post page. Many blogs are collaborative, and it would be helpful to know at a glance who is writing.
Anything but ads! Heavens no… Whatever it is, I would like to be able to control it –whether it appears globally or for individual posts.
You could display some number of the most recent posts in the same category. Or, allow us to “relate” post categories to one another and then display those related categories/posts.
You could use contextual filtering to “decide” which posts are related to this particular one and display them.
How about personalization? I’d love for WordPress to open up more features for personalization. I’d love to personalize the text right above the comment box to something different than “Leave a comment”.
Related post links under the post = FAB idea and most important. We already do this manually. Some method to assist selecting from a list would be a time-saver.
Related posts would definitely be my first choice. My next choice would be popular posts, then a random post from my blog. I think that’s the most useful order for my readers: similar to what they already ready, then what other people have found useful, then random posts. I’m not sure I’d even use the random post feature, personally, since statistically it would likely end up to be a post with just annotated links on my blog. I can see that it would be fun for discovery on other blogs though.
i have a “addthis.com” bar under my posts, but it does not realy belong to the post i think so it would be nice if it was part of the page.
(i hope you do understand what i am talking about 😉
Related posts would be good.
# Related posts
# Ads
I have to agree with related posts. That’s such a cool idea. Rock on WP!!!!
RELATED POSTS !!!! ALL THE WAY ! 😛
Popular posts comes in second and lastly random same-blog posts
links that would go to the previous and next single post pages on our blog (instead of having to go back to the full page and select individual posts).
Hi, Matt…”related posts” would be my first choice. I do a lot of internal linking, when appropriate, and it would look so polished to have it standardized.
Related Posts would be my first choice, though some kind of interaction on the bloggers part would be essential for this to work, perhaps for a start avoiding too many posts as “Uncategorized”. 😉
I think that ‘Popular Posts’ would work well too.
Related posts would be killer, and something that I’ve seen a lot of people (on and off WordPress.com) doing, probably manually. From a sheer-geekiness perspective, I’m also curious if there’s a good way of finding related posts automatically.
Related posts is number one on my wishlist, followed by popular posts (of all time, not just the past 24 hours). Thanks!
I really like the idea of related posts — the popular posts can be handled with the sidebar widget, so that’s less interesting to me. But related posts would be great. That would be my vote for most useful and interesting option.
Author profile, again, is something that can be handled pretty well with Pages…not sure that’s necessary. And I, for one, would not put a blogroll or avatars between my post and the comments — I think that would break things up for the reader.
Ads, though, is an interesting possibility. Subtle ads. Pretty ads. Ads that don’t move or jump or spin. But ads, nonetheless. I’d be interested in that.
My vote is related same blog (or blogroll posts)
Eoin
I love the “related posts” idea very much. Also, author profile is an excellent idea with contact info.
I would love to have the related posts feature above all the other ones you mentioned!
Related posts
Am I the first to comment *drum rolls*
On a serious note, I feel this can have amazing implications…
Hi Matt,
A “share this” row of linked icons or other method to enable sharing posts with others easily via social bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us and StumbleUpon, would be fantastic.
Currently, I have to manually input the permalink URL and post title to get this to work on WordPress.com – far too time consuming!
Related posts is a good idea. It would be awesome if you could put in the avatar too. It would pesonalise the post a lot more by my reckoning.
I can imagine it’s be quite hard for you to put the Related posts, but then again, y’all are doping a fine job so far. Loving every moment on wordpress. keep up the excellent work.
I love the related posts idea. Anything that makes WordPress pull ahead of the other platforms.
i’d rather see related posts as a widget.
related posts under the post always looks spammy.
perhaps you could just make a special widget space under the post? one that’s always styled as display: inline; ?
Related Post! Of course!
Other posts in the same category
or
Author profile
or Popular posts
Even better if user could choose which he wanted… 🙂
Ads are a cool idea, but I hope that:
1) They don’t come with sound.
2) They don’t come in indecipherable languages if I post something in Tagalog.
Anyway, all the best in further developing WordPress into the hotness that it is now.
Maybe the ability to add some “social networking” buttons (digg etc).
I Talk News has a related thread after you post a link or a story a great feature..it becomes a part of your subject that you have written on.
Ads is a great idea as long as it’s up to the blogger what ads go there (Google Analytics anyone?)
“Related posts” would be GREAT!!!
I would like to have popular posts, related things and ads
Or maybe a place were to upload a banner with our own ad about some other web 2.0 project…
Yours are all good suggestions, and as you say, “related posts” is the most interesting of those.
You could do something based on referrer. If lots of people are visiting from slashdot, or reddit, you could say “Welcome to visitors from slashdot/reddit, etc”.
On a similar theme you could give some indication of how popular the post is at the moment.
I like the “related posts.”
How about showing the related posts that are under the same tags/categories?
I guess it won’t be too difficult (sorry, I don’t know programming) to make that since it’s like clicking on the tag list or tag cloud.
No ads please!
As to the permalink, I wonder whether it’s possible that after clicking the permalink, a copied permalink will pop out below without reloading or linking to a new page, like how FlicXX offers a photo’s URL on the page of available sizes. Or maybe, just show the URL below, no more poping out.
Thanks a lot!
Thanks very much 4 evey special thing that u have been doing 4 me,i will be glard with every kind of post u have been giving to me thanks 4 ur co-operation.