Joe Lazarus (on his Tumblog, of course) came right out and asked why reblog plugins are uncommon or nonexistent for the bigger blogging tools.

At first I was a bit skeptical, but quickly realized that I was overcomplicating the idea and it looks like I ended up thinking the same thing that you are.

I was actually thinking of bastardizing RSS for the data — basically having a “reblog URL” that’s a single-item RSS feed — though I’m not sure that’s the best idea. It has the benefit of pulling the entire post content (as a Tumblr reblog does), as well as retaining all the information you need to automatically provide attribution.

With a format defined, a Wordpress plugin then seems very manageable: each post has a reblog link/button/what-have-you similar to a trackback link. You modify the WP post page to accept a reblog URL, pull the content from the URL and prepopulate the post page correctly. (If you wanted to go crazy with the unsupported fun, you could even go the URI scheme route and have something like reblog:http://example.com/the-post-title/reblog/ to try to eliminate the copy/paste step.)

I’m going to try to play around with a test plugin a bit over the next couple of weeks, but I’m also very curious to see how you end up integrating the ideas you’ve outlined into what you’re already doing.

- Whit