Ad Terras Per Aspera

Jeremy Zawodny decided today to declare trackbacks dead. Excuse me while I stifle a giggle. With all the services that support trackback now (including Yahoo! News), and third party services to add trackback easily (such as Haloscan, like I use), trackback is far from dead.

Though, theres a few people who agree with Jeremy: “Trackbacks are a good distributed system similar to fallout shelters of the 50’s. At the time, we really needed them, but now with the rise of Technorati, Feedster and PubSub, we have something much better than trackback.” says Steve Kirks.

For those that aren’t versed in the ways of Blog-fu, a trackback is, according to Wikipedia, “a mechanism used in a blog that shows a list of entries in other blogs that refer to a post on the first blog.” In other words, its a method to reply to blogs by using your own blog.

Trackbacks are not without problem, of course. There is the vicious scourge of trackback spam, where spammers send a trackback back to your blog, and try to convince your readers to buy their product. See this entry Alden Bates’ Weblog for an example of what people have to do to stop spamming, its quite simple.

If trackback dead, why would Haloscan have more than 100,000 users*? Or why would Yahoo!, C|Net, and other big name sites support trackback? And I certainly wouldn’t have added trackback to my own blog if I didn’t think it was useful.

Supporters of alternate systems often say Technorati, PubSub, or other systems are the answer. They are simply part of the answer. Technorati simply tracks links mentioned from blogs, as to be able to see who is linking to who/what; problem is, you can’t display how many links are linked to your blog entry itself, unlike comments or trackbacks.

PubSub, on the other hand, is sorta like a Google for information sources, and you get all your results in an RSS feed. Amazingly useful, yes, but its only part of the answer. Neither PubSub nor Technorati allow your readers to be informed of further information contained on other blogs; said further information is written by your readers. In other words, your readers communicate with each other and form a community.

“Why is a community important?”, you ask. Communities are what power blogs, or really, all websites. Comments, trackbacks, forums, and message boards all allow users to communicate with each other. Then you also have websites and blogs about communication forms themselves, such as IRC channels and Usenet groups, or mailing lists, or just stuff for people who know each other in real life.

Just to prove trackback isn’t dead, I’m going to trackback to Jeremy’s article.

_{* 100,000 is quite a lot when you realise Movable Type and WordPress both natively support trackback, and a vast majority of active blogs use MT or WP.}

Update: The Net Is Dead has a few good comments on why trackback isn’t dead, and Temple of the Screaming Penguin explains why Pingback, an alternative to Trackback, doesn’t work either.