Does Anyone Use Trackbacks Anymore?
Yesterday, I wrote a post about why Macs are more expensive than Windows machines. In citing a couple of other blogs, I ran into a rarely-seen creature: the trackback. You know, that tool that lets bloggers know when someone else has mentioned/acknowledged their blog.
At one time, the trackback was fairly de rigeur within the blogging world but it’s a tool that has been shuffled to the background. Much of the trackback’s demise likely has to do with spam. It got to the point where the poor, innocent trackback was being terribly abused, forcing many bloggers such as Jeremy Zawodny to abandon using trackbacks.
it’s unfortunate that trackbacks have been forced to the blogging scrap heap because they are, in practice, a useful and valuable tool to track conversations and establish direct links between blogs. You don’t get the same thing with hyperlinks, although it’s always good to see people providing a link if they think what you have to say is interesting/valuable.
Given there should be a place for trackbacks within the blogosphere, I wonder if there’s a way to revive them?
Perhaps Wordpress could use some of its influence and Akismet magic to introduce a new and improved trackback? Maybe it’s just a matter of the large blog publishers getting together to establish a new standard that works for everyone..other than spammers.
Links: Check out Paul O’Flaherty’s passionate defense of the trackback, as well as Jeff Atwood’s take on why the trackback died.
August 7th, 2008 at 11:39 am
I think trackbacks are alive and well. I get emails for them all the time.
August 7th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
I certainly don’t use TrackBacks at all.
Back in July of ‘07, I was on the same wavelength you are:
Did Trackbacks Die, and Who Killed Them?
http://www.louisgray.com/live/2007/07/did-trackbacks-die-and-who-killed-them.html
August 7th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Louis,
You make a great point about how effective trackbacks can be to attract attention. I know, for example, that when I use a trackback to credit a TechCrunch story, my blog gets lots of traffic - probably because the trackbacks appear before the comments on the TechCrunch post.
August 7th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Wordpress also uses pingback - same as trackback only you don’t have to do anything, kinda wordpress blogs talking between themselves.
August 7th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
I continue to use them and even display inbound Trackbacks inline under posts. It’s not that hard to control spam, using Akismet and other plugins.
The main defect, really, is that it’s a very partial and selective list. Plus, WordPress introduced the competing and poorly formatted PingBack to dilute the field.
August 7th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
I get trackbacks/pingbacks, but not nearly as frequently as I did a couple of years ago. SPAM is a menace that makes us all cynical and ruins community. Death to spammers.
August 7th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Mark, I think trackbacks are valuable, and they can be even more so if major platforms like Wordpress started automating them.
It’s already tough enough at times to generate content and find the right links for your blog posts, so most authors don’t want to go through the trouble of finding the trackback links for things they link to. We should be making the online discussion easier, not harder.
It would be great if more platforms supported trackbacks, too - not just so called “blogging” software. As we speak, I’m writing a trackback feature into a forum - and hey, isn’t that what this is all about, social interaction? I don’t believe forums, blogs, discussion groups, or chats are all that different - they all perpetuate our online communication.
It’s just a matter of making sure all that information gets linked and connected in the right ways.
August 7th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
>if major platforms like Wordpress started automating them.
See above about pingbacks… Wordpress is already doing exactly that.
Not sure about other platforms.
August 7th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
As has been noted above several times, Wordpress automates pingbacks between Wordpress blogs and you have to manually do trackbacks to other sites (eg ReadWriteWeb which is Movable Type). Of course, you know all this given that this is a Wordpress-based site anyway
I get a lot of trackback spam, but Akismet picks all of it up. I quite like getting legitmate trackbacks just for the warm fuzzies of someone else liked what I wrote enough to link back to it.
What’s interesting is some sites seem to turn trackbacks off for old posts which means if you don’t link while it’s fresh, it won’t show up. I guess it’s a spam management issue for the bigger, higher-traffic sites.
To make a short answer way too long, yes I use trackbacks but I can see why others don’t. The spam really can be unpleasant and high traffic sites must get a hell of a lot of it, judging by the volume my low traffic site gets.
August 8th, 2008 at 8:37 am
No one uses trackbacks anymore? News to me.
August 9th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
i do.
i like it.
August 12th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
I’m definitely a fan of the trackback, but as some people have mentioned, it’s kind of a pain to hunt down who does and does not accept them. The link value was just too much opportunity for spammers I guess, and subsequently, it kind of ruined the system. I’ve seen the wordpress pingback stuff, and it’d be nice if there was something even more robust as perhaps a suggestion tool of some kind.