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 |
Marco
August 28, 2005 — 5:33 pm
I actually like the fact that I can see someone has written a post related to one of mine because of the trackback I received. Spam was a problem for a while but I’ve managed to completely kill the trackback spammers on my blog and I’m now enjoying 100% spam free trackbacks. I really think trackback is more (and nicer) than just a link!
Fred
August 28, 2005 — 6:24 pm
Hi Marco!
You are right, this is much more direct to have a trackback than using something like Talk Digger; I can’t contradict that fact.
However, do you agree that trackbacks are not natural? It takes time to blogging world’s newcomers to figure out what trackbacks are, and even more how to use them. As I see things, I do not think that trackbacks will have their place in 5 years; but it is really a personal opinion.
But this is just not a question of spammers; this is also a question of usability. How to implement the idea to make it even more easy to use? This is the question. Things evolve and I think that trackbacks will too.
By the way, I just checked your blog; you have a dam cool one! I think I am now jealous; no, I do not think, I am.
Salutations,
Fred
tom sherman
August 28, 2005 — 8:54 pm
Fred,
What do you think about Pingback? I would be curious to know if you think it’s more natural or useful than TrackBack.
I agree that manually trackbacking can be tedious, but the autodiscoverability feature of trackback serves to automatically pull together contextually related blog entries. This is a powerful and useful feature. Without trackback, I would never have known about a lot of folks who linked me!
Sudar
August 29, 2005 — 1:23 am
Tom,
Even I think Pingback are superior than Trackback or just plain links.
Fred,
Eevn I am waiting for your response on pingbacks when compared with trackback or just plain links
Fred
August 29, 2005 — 1:59 am
Hi guys,
I am happy that people do not agree with me 🙂
Have in mind that I wrote that post to try to seek for an idea; to try to figure out some things. However, I am not right and you are not wrong. So there is my current answer to your question:
It is sure that pingbacks are most powerful than trackbacks: no doubts. However, one of the problems is that not all blogging systems support pingbacks. After, if we take the problems a little bit larger than the Blogsphere: what about non-blogging website, BBC or Guardian articles? The thing with tracbacks/pingbacks is that not everybody that writes about a story will ping the website’s story or all the other articles that talk about that article. The problem is that if the seed article die, the whole conversion would also die. It is the way I see thing, and why I think that we would need, eventually, to review the way we implemented the concept.
I am possibly wrong with that assertion; however it is good to think back about it by being questioned; so thank guys and tell me if I am wrong!
What do you think?
Salutations,
Fred
Marco
August 31, 2005 — 9:53 am
Fred, I agree about trackback being somewhat obscure to new bloggers. But on the other hand I’d say if someone’s able to set up WordPress, MT, Pivot or any other blogtool I expect him/her to be able to do some reading and understand the trackback mechanism. After all it doesn’t need more than just copy/pasting a link. But yes… from experience I know that to some people even the simplest tasks are quite hard so an easier solution would be nice. Pingback looks somewhat easier indeed from a user’s perspective. However technically it looks like quite a challenge to implement. I guess there’s another thing on my TODO list: write a pingback interface for Pivot 😉
Thanks for the nice comment about my blog!
Migs
March 12, 2006 — 11:50 am
Hi! Nice work on Talk Digger. There is a problem though, and it’s not your fault but that of the search engines you’re using.
They index the entire HTML page, so those “blogroll” type links point to me even when they are not linking back to the conversation.
One solution I have in mind is using OPML inside the feeds.
A simpler, but less elegant solution, is to give the blog search engines an option to return only sites that link to an article, and not the root of the blog.
Fred
March 12, 2006 — 2:26 pm
Hi Migs,
Yup you are right, call it OPML or RDF or RDFS or OWL or DAML or anything acronym you can find: the web of the future is a meta-web where metadata will describe the relationship (semantic) between that data.
Personally I am an advocate of emerging semantic web languages (syntaxes) of the RDF family (RDF->RDFS->OWL). Why? Because deep academic researches have been made to come-up with these definitions, many tools and frameworks are emerging and effective experiments have been made. However a thing is sure: if we need a semantic web, we will have to make it semantic, and to make it semantic, we have to annotate in some ways the resources to describe their relations.
Right now the problem you mentioned with Talk Digger is real and undesired, so I will start to think how it could be solved with the first solutions you mentioned in mind.
Thanks!
Salutations,
Fred
Webby
October 2, 2006 — 7:46 pm
Learning MT blog. You’re right about the subject of new bloggers learning trackbacks. It seems that trackbacks are three things???:
1) a comment/reply
2) a 1-way outbound link
3) A notification that doesn’t use email
How are you notified by a ‘ping’ ? You have to look on blog?
Webby
Fred
October 5, 2006 — 9:02 pm
Hi Webby!
A trackback is a way to say to a blog: “Hey you! I talked about that article on my own blog, there is the link, please add it to your article”.
It is a way to notify a blog that you talked about it on your own blog. So people that will read this blog post, will have to possibility to follow the discussion by clicking on the link to your own article.
A “Ping” is a way to notify a system like weblogs.com to tell him that you updated your blog. weblogs.com is a server that aggregate all the pings from all the blogs (that ping it). Then, other softwares, like a search engine (technorati.com) will download the “pings list” and index them in their search engine for example.
Is it a good description of what is the difference between a ping and a trackback?
Salutations,
Fred