Trackbacks are an essential component of blogging, they are the footnotes of the digital age. Did you ever have to write a paper in collage? Then you recall going to the library and jotting down nuggets of knowledge from dusty old reference books, but my professors always insisted on footnotes: giving credit to the source of those nuggets. It wasn't easy, you needed to stick a number besides the copied paragraph and at the bottom of the page to indicate who wrote it and who published it and when.
When blogging we're grabbing nuggets of information from other peoples blogs everyday, but we don't have to assign each a number or reference it at the end of each blog post. We trackback and we receive trackbacks from other bloggers who use our stuff. Robert Scoble wrote on Channel9 the other day that trackbacks are broken, the truth is that between different blogging platforms there is no interoperability.
TrackBack was first released as an open specification in August 2002. It was released as both a protocol and as a feature of Movable Type 2.2, which contained the first implementation of TrackBack. Since the true value of TrackBack only comes when many sites support it, TrackBack was always planned as an open system: a system that could be easily implemented in other weblogging tools.
To date, TrackBack has been implemented in the following tools:
- Movable Type
- Bloxsom
- Blojsom
- Nucleus
- B2
- Radio
- TrackBack standalone Tool
I'm blogging on Community Server an ASP.Net application and trackbacks are a simple matter of copying another blog posts title and pasting it on my blog, the trackback is registered instantly on the contributing blog post. This only works between ASP.Net blogging applications, Community Server and DasBlog. I have tried many times to trackback to Movable Type and WordPress but it doesn't just happen, so I just link to give credit where credit is due.
Edit: according to my logs and on movabletype.org I successfully trackbacked with this post!
There are other blogging platforms, Yahoo 360, MSN Spaces and Blogger that appear to want to remain as gated communities, growing their numbers just to sell advertising.
Then there are the nefarious trackback spammers, out to suck the Google juice from our veins. Just when we get a handle on comment spam they adapted and now we need to counter them again. I can't delete tackbacks on Community Server at present, but hopefully by version 1.1 and certainly by 2.0 I will be able to.
What can we say about the people who rip content from our blogs without the courtesy of trackbacks or a link just to sell ads, at present there is nothing we can do about this but protest.
What is the answer to interoperability between platforms? I have a feeling it's going to be an XML Webservice, WebServices are designed to be interoperable through UDDI and it's time we started using them.
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