Robert Scoble discovered purple numbers, the usually purple coloured permalinks for paragraphs. I was too fast commenting:
The idea is very good, but as you say, nobody is going to do this manually, and in all those months (years?) since the original idea, nobody implemented it in any CMS.
I got corrected immediately by David Winer, who's site has a very good implementation of purple numbers, using the edit time as an anchor to make sure each permalink is unique.
Another comment pointed me to a WordPress plug-in, which of course brings the question: Did anybody make a plugin for Movable Type?
; "Movable Type")
; "CeBIT")
; "ClamWin updating")
; "Google Notebook - New!")
; "Events report by file type")
; "Google Analytics")
; "Jesus at Christmas")
; "from e-mail to Enterprise Social Software")
; "Eleven")
; "Apple")
I've seen these on Scripting News, and now it looks like I can add them to TADSpot. I'm not really sure why, but I think it's a cool idea, and like someone else mentioned it may be useful in the future for indexing and such. If I can figure out how to make the pilcrows to be unobtrusive, I may add them to TADSpot.
Purple numbers are also very handy when you want to point somebody to a specific paragraph of your text, or when you a have a single post with various links as David Winer has in Scripting News.