Clumping

In the previous entry I breezily wrote, “as a number of people ‘round these parts discussed at length some months ago.” I didn’t include any actual trackbacks because I was too lazy to go hauling the permalinks out of a half dozen or more individual blog archives. A reader who doesn’t have any idea what I’m talking about is clearly out of luck. Which leads me to another MT plug-in or feature I’d like to see:

What if we could automagically clump our conversations by specifying one (or more) initial entries to an agent I’m imagining as a “trackback spider,” which would then proceed to harvest and arrange the webbed up links—threaded according to date, relevance, or other such criteria—on an auto-generated page that could become a single, manageable link target in a casual reference such as the one above?

Make sense? In other words, instead of manually reconstructing the threads of a multi-blog conversation, the agent does it for you and publishes the links. Would this not be the next step in leveraging the power of trackback? Would this allow us to map/visualize the shapes of such conversations?