Trackbacks are useless, let links!

Frederick Giasson

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?

  1. It works with systems that does not support trackbacks
  2. It takes only a second to make a link, so in 10 seconds you can create 10 trackbacks
  3. 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?

  1. 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
  2. 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.

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Choice, fear, life and act

Frederick Giasson

Why some people act, and other don’t? Why some people succeed and other don’t? Why some people sometime take risks and other don’t?

  1. Fear
  2. Lack of self-confidence
  3. Lack of knowledge
  4. Trying to do too much alone
  5. Trying to do too much
  6. Loss of self
  7. Lack of energy
  8. Lack of reward
  9. It can’t be done

I urge you to read the explanation of these 9 points on Dave Pollard’s article. It is all about life and understanding. It is to understand your reactions and the reactions of others in certain situations.

The most important point is the number one. Dave resumes it by writing:

Fear: We are legitimately afraid we will fail, or that we don’t have the needed skill, or that others will criticize us. We are afraid, most of all, of the consequences of failure — humiliation, ridicule, loss of financial or employment or social status. It isn’t risk we dislike, it’s failure.

I would add something to that description: the fear of passing by something that could bring you more joy, better life, more wealth. This situation arise when you have a choice to do in you life, any choice, professional or personal. You can gather all the knowledge you can put the hands on, you can make all the scenarios you want, spend years to analyze the situation and take your decision, and pass by anyway. The thing here is that you can’t choose the optimal choice each time you have a choice to make. The life is like this and only one certainty exist: we born to die. All the things between these two boundaries are totally uncertain and unpredictable.

You are on the principal road. Eventually you have an opportunity to turn right. What will you do? How to know if it is better to continue on the current road, safe but not necessarily optimal, and the new road, one that you have no knowledge on. You need to act, you need to make a choice, but which will you choose? The know or the new one? The first point of Dave will force, most of the time, people to continue on the main know road instead of choosing the new unknown path, in fear of failure: the failure of having make a non-optimal, less rewarding, choice. Sometime it could be the right thing to do, but have in mind that other time you also take that decision to do that instead of something you should do.

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Everybody has something to say: now we need to connect them

Frederick Giasson

Rich or poor, male or female, Muslim or Christian, in health or not: everybody has something to say. We are social creatures and our deepest desire is to share our thoughts and learn about people we meet. Over centuries, communication evolved. From growl to talk, from voice language to body language, we communicate what we think about some things to others. We developed tools to survive, and we also developed tool to communicate: from smoke signals to the Internet.

Internet has growth exponentially in the last decade. Now everybody can have access to his personal web space for free. Everybody that has access to the Internet, and the knowledge, can share his thoughts with the rest of the World. This is where we are now.

The next problem we will need to solve is: how to connect these people? Many technologies have been tested and implemented to try to resolve this problem. Some works, others don’t, but all have some drawbacks. There is a list of some of these technologies:

  1. General search engines
  2. Specialized search engines
  3. Contact networks supported by some type of search engines based on people’s location, sex, interests, etc.
  4. Trackbacks systems in blog engines
  5. Tags
  6. Networks like 43things.com
  7. Web 2.0 ceoncepts like FOAF (Friend Of A Friend)
  8. Talk Digger: check who is talking about someone or something, then enter the conversion and get connected with them

However, no one of these techniques work effectively. They are all time consuming for anyone who tries to connect to somebody else that shares the same goal, interest, etc. They all try to resolve the problem, but they all have their drawbacks. The next step is to try to connect all the current information in such a way that connections will emerge from the mass.

The next step is proposed by Adina Alevin: conversion clouds. What is a conversion cloud?

The cloud would be a picture of a conversation surrounding a person or a topic. The picture would show the relationships between the participants in a conversation. The densest areas would represent people who frequently cross-reference each other over time.

It is a way to dynamically create relation links between conversations and a new way to browse them. The idea is really attractive and it makes sense. What I personally like in the above idea is the concept of time: conversation over time. The oldest the conversation, the richest in information it is and the greater his value.

She also add:

p.s. Zawodny talks about the need for content discovery. I don’t know about you, but a lot of the content that I discover comes from browsing through a conversation and finding voices that I want to keep hearing.

A way new way to discover new content… it is exactly what I discovered the first time I checked at blogs. I came across a whole lot of information that I would never be able to discover by another way. However, things change and now I do not have all the time I would need to discover all the content hided into my subscribed feeds, so we need a new way to discover it, and that conversion cloud could be a partial answer to the current problem.

I will throw that idea without thinking about it: what if these conversion clouds replace web feeds? What if such a technology would make web feeds useless? I mean, I would search for conversation I like, and not people. That way, I would always spend my time to read things useful for me, and not browse content in search of that usefulness. If a person I like write about something useful to me, than I will read it with pleasure, otherwise, I will not. Do you see the same thing I see?

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