Project Description: Blogroll Widget

I've been wanting to build one of them thar Web 2.0 Widget Thingamabobs for a while now. The problem, of course, is that almost everything has been done. Not always to my specifications, of course, but often close enough to let the laziness factor kick in. However, I have yet to find a Blogroll Widget of any sort that will satisfy my theoretical use case, and it seems like it should be easy enough to design.

Here's my plan: I'd like to auto-generate the blogroll by querying my del.icio.us account, perhaps for the tags iot+blogroll for this blog or cas+blogroll for Cheating At Solitaire, my poker blog. From what I understand, having not yet looked at the API, this should be a trivial implementation. However, I'd like to go a step further, adding the ability to add meta-data such as feed or author links. I think this could be accomplished by embedding formatted text in the description field, although that may violate a TOS or something. A preferable method would involve tagging additional links with the same title and iot+blogroll+feed, for example. I'm not sure if their querying structure will support that, however.

It seems to me to using del.icio.us as a back end for this sort of thing would allow the ability to insert one of those little buttons on your page that would allow others to automatically add you to their blogrolls. You could even add such a thing directly to your feeds, if you use a service such as Feedburner. Obviously, the real Web 2.0 way to do this would be to announce a startup called iBlogRoll.com or MyBlogBuddies or something and then try to get VC funding prior to actually writing a line of code. And of course, I may still do that... hmm, wonder if someone has already snapped up those domains?

Anyway, I'm not sure if or when I'll get time to work on this, but I thought it might be a good idea to get the project notes down while I'm still high and think that I can accomplish something. Later, once I realize that I'm nearly completely useless, I'll feel properly embarrassed about posting this I'm sure.