“Things are only impossible until they’re not.”— Jean-Luc Picard
Jean-Luc Picard
Michael Hanson
“To will is to select a goal, determine a course of action that will bring one to that goal, and then hold to that action till the goal is reached. The key is action.”— Michael Hanson
Rabbinical Saying
“Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.”— Rabbinical Saying
Ulysses S. Grant
“The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving.”— Ulysses S. Grant
Trackbacks are useless, let links!
Trackbacks: an essential characteristic of blogs: false
I first thought that trackbacking was an essential characteristic of blogs. I used trackbacks and I implemented them on my blogs. I pinged trackback systems to let authors know that I wrote about their articles, other people pinged my trackback system to let me know that they wrote something about one of my articles.
I thought my thought about trackbacks was good, but I was wrong.
Trackbacks: only good to be spammed
My thought changed: trackbacks are only good to be spammed. With the experience I have with some blogging system and blogs I maintained, I mostly only had problems with trackback spamming. Many blogging systems have some implementation problems with trackbacks and do not give any feature to try to handle trackback spamming.
Trackbacks: unnecessary works
You write something about an article you want to talk about. You publish that post on your blog. Now you want to let the author know that you write something about about his article. So you use an application to ping the author’s trackbacks server, and finally ping it. You spent many precious minute to do the work, and you will do that extra work each time you want to be trackbacked by a system.
Instead: links to that article, it only takes a second
In a second you can link to an article, and many others. A simple link into one of you post is much powerful than a trackback, why?
- It works with systems that does not support trackbacks
- It takes only a second to make a link, so in 10 seconds you can create 10 trackbacks
- It add value to your posts for your reader
A trackback is a link, and then a link is a trackback.
How the authors will know that I linked to their article?
- Search engines will know that you put a link to a specific document in your web content, so if people ask them who links to a specific URL, they will return all the web sites, including yours, that links to it
- If one of you reader click on the link, the web server that store the article belonging to that URL will log the entry page. Then the author will know, when he will check at his log, that you are linking to one of his article
Read that article: Talk Digger: Join and follow discussions of the Blogsphere, for a better understanding of the concept.
Dynamic trackbacks using Talk Digger
I put down the trackback system on my personal blogs. Why? Because they are useless and that they are an open door for spammers.
I replaced the trackback section by a link to the Talk Digger system. That way, if you link to one of my article using his permalink, and if one of my readers clicks on the Talk Digger’s link, he will instantly know who talked about that article, and he will ultimately be able to follow/enter into the discussion evolving around it.
This is what I call dynamic trackbacks: include a single link into one of your post and all the connections will be done intrinsically; finally a discussion will then emerge from that cloud of links.
Technorati: trackback | spam | blogs | blogging | link | connections | network | conversation | discussion | talkdigger |