Recently WordPress.com (re)introduced reblogging, as seen on Tumblr.

When you’re logged in and looking at another WordPress.com blog post, the toolbar displays a reblog option. Clicking it presents a little window to add a comment and select which of your blogs you want to post to:

And here’s what a reblogged post looks like:

An excerpt from the reblogged post is embedded in such a way that it forces you to give proper attribution, which should keep reblogees happy.

However, I don’t think this is a very useful feature for the reblogger.

• You get no control over reblog presentation. It looks like they try to do something clever with how images are presented (similar to a Posterous or Google+ mini-gallery), but in my example it kind of ruined the point of the post I was reblogging.
• The toolbar has no useful options:
  • No ability to customise the URL of your blog post.
  • No ability to edit the title your post will have!
  • No ability to add categories or tags.
  • No ability to change post format.
• Speaking of post formats, link would have been a much more sensible default, but no, standard it is.
• The reblogged post didn’t get promoted on Twitter either, despite that being my default setting.

In addition:

• If you try and expand your comment below the reblog into a post, you’ll find that the formatting is different (lists don’t display properly, images won’t have proper padding applied, etc).
• You wont be able to change the title of your post or remove the reblog snippet. These won’t even appear in your post edit window.

Without any control basics like these, the reblog feature will be useless to me.