I love WordPress. It’s by far the best blogging system I’ve used. It offers flexibility, is easy to use and although there’s a limited choice of templates, the end-result is suprisingly professional-looking. I also love the way WordPress regularly points users and readers to other sites with various links. But I’m often puzzled by the “possibly related posts” that appear at the bottom of my posts.

Many are loosely relevant. Some are a bit strange. And a few of them could be best described as “not even remotely related”. For example, my previous post was a piece about the book “The Age of Unreason” written by Charles Handy.

One of the suggested links was clearly related. We were warned, we were! suggests the management guru predicted the current economic downturn. That’s fair enough. That’s slightly better than loosely relevant.

Another suggested link falls into the not even closely related category. Online Stories and other interactive goodies! lists some on-line sites of interest to teachers.

Somehow the WordPress “possibly related” algorithm linked this to Le Grand Echiquier 6 on the Shirley Bassey blog. I’m not entirely sure this isn’t some kind of spoof. Whatever it is, it certainly qualifies as strange.

Equally odd, the Zemanta software, which I wrote about earlier here and here, must have read the reference to Shirely Bassey, dug around in the darkest recesses of its electronic mind and suggested James Bond as a tag for this post. Ms Bassey sang the theme song for one of the Bond movies, so I can see where the link might have come from, but it’s still a long shot.

My conclusion from this is that the various possibly-related algorithms currently in use are still at an early development stage.