I have seen this feature on some other blogs for the past few months and I know that it has helped to generate some traffic back to my site so I have been looking for an easy way to improve my blogroll to display the most recent post below the link.

Here are 2 plugins that are available to spruce up your blogroll.

• What Others are Saying – this one has been around for a while and from the website it looks like there is tons of support for this plugin, but you have to add the RSS feed for each link to the link page for this plugin to display the links.
• Feed Reading Blogroll – this plugin will take your existing links, automatically find the rss feed and display the most recent post under the link name.  There are lots of option and you can customize the look of your links in many ways – including hiding link categories that you don’t want to display. You can also sort the bookmarks by last updated rather than name, which could be a nice way to keep your blogroll with fresh content.

Blogtelling is currently running Feed Reading Blogroll on the side bar – it was easy to set up and customize the look – I like that I can add how recently the post was updated.

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Image by chucks via Flickr

While reading the daily update from ChrisBrogan.com today I noticed a new little link at the bottom of the post:

I have spent many an afternoon trying to set up a reblogging feature on WordPress but I have never had much success.  Reblogging is publishing post from other blogs on your blog.  So I was interested in checking out this little link.  The REBLOG link takes you to the website for Zemanta.  Zemanta is a tool that suggests related content and pictures to your posts.  Zemanta can be used in 2 ways – You can add it as a plugin to WordPress or there is a browser extension you can add to your internet.  I am writing this post using Zemanta and so far it is a dream.  In one click I was able to link the words “browser extension” to the wikipedia page.  Zemanta also suggested about 20 pictures that might be good for this post.  With 1 click I was able to add the image of the screenshot above.

Zemanta also suggests some related blog posts, if you would like to read more about Zemanta check out some of these posts below.  This is also a great feature because I discovered some blogs I have not seen before.

• My Blogging Workflow: Thoughts From My Podcamp Boston 3 Presentation
• Zemanta – Enhancing Your Blog Post
• Have You Tried Zemanta?
• Zemanta – Blogging like whoah
• Blogging is a Breeze with Zemanta