IV. Trackbacks

Sour Duck's Blogging Basics: Trackbacks

The purpose of trackbacks is to let readers and the blog author know that you've written something about their post at your blog.

Wikipedia provides this explanation:

"TrackBack is a mechanism for communication between blogs: if a blogger writes a new entry commenting on, or referring to, an entry found at another blog, and both blogging tools support the TrackBack protocol, then the commenting blogger can notify the other blog with a 'TrackBack ping'; the receiving blog will typically display summaries of, and links to, all the commenting entries below the original entry. This allows for conversations spanning several blogs that readers can easily follow."

Are trackbacks useful? I don't think so. To my mind, trackbacks are redundant because:

1. You can always leave a comment with a link.
2. People use blog search engines to track who is linking to them.

With the above two solutions, trackbacks are outdated and there's not enough incentive to use them.

Additionally, trackbacks are problematic because not all blog platforms support them. Blogger, for instance, does not support trackbacks. There are plug-ins that enable you to have trackbacks, but the negligible usefulness of trackbacks does not warrant bothering to install them.

Trackbacks?

Feh. You can get along just fine without 'em.

For further information, see Wikipedia's entry on "TrackBack".