I’ve just put on a new blog widgety tool thing by AdaptiveBlue. Smartlinks is free, and available for most major blogging platforms (and even for this one on Squarespace). You can find them if you think them helpful, from the button in the meta area of my sidebar, or from this link here.

You can see these in action in the previous blog entry on Favourite Children’s books. When listing the books, I chose to link to them via amazon.co.uk for myself and any UK readers. But once installed, Smartlinks recognises the amazon link, and puts a little blue icon (for a book) to the right. You can either click on the normal link, to take you to my amazon.co.uk or click on that blue icon and a pop-up window will offer you several links, the book cover etc - and US readers can go to find the book at Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble etc. I presume that the same might work for antipodean bloggers, who may choose to link to amazon.co.aus or whatever it is, and still have the ability to provide information for any US readers.

Smartlinks also works for movies and some other media files, but the predominant usage for me is for books. The little pop-up window also lets me check the book through onto stumbleupon or librarything (where I am cataloguing my reading books currently).