Digitalia Alasdair’s workblog and linkdump

Trackback Backtrack

My cousin has been writing on the topic of trackbacks versus comments on his blog, and I thought I’d pitch in with tuppen’orth.

I think there are a number of reasons that trackbacks haven’t taken off. Spam is one of them, sure - if you’re popular enough to generate discussion among other bloggers, then you’re probably popular enough to be a target to get spammed six ways from sunday. (As opposed to the likes of me, where I just have to delete 20 to 30 comments spams that get through my filter every day. I’m glad I’m not more popular - I’d never have time to do anything else.)

Another consideration though, is that many bloggers try and stick to a topic within their blogs. If I weren’t the sort of person to run 47 different blogs, and only ran my rarely-updated art and design blog at black-ink.org then I probably wouldn’t feel I had a trackback-enabled venue to respond in. And even though I do, in my tech/media/general webjunk blog here, were I less technical I might find actually making the trackback a challenge.

But honestly, I think that’s incidental compared to this:

Trackbacks aren’t a natural way to discuss things. They’re not immediate. Imagine being in a pub (the traditional metaphor for on-line discourse, for reasons lost to antiquity, but probably having to do with the similarity between trolls and the drunken idiot at the bar slurring unintelligibly at any who comes to close) with your friends, holding forth in a witty and erudite manner on the works of Kierkegaard and their relevance to Keynesian macro-economics (or perhaps just the merits of Angelina Jolie’s arse - find your own metaphorical level). You make a particularly apposite point, at which point, three of your friends respond, and the fourth gets up, leaves, and then, three days later, phones you up to respond. You other three friends have since fucked off to parts unknown, and you and he are alone with this strangely context free response.

Trackbacks, technorati rankings and the associated jazz are great if you’re a media type wanting to get a sense of what the collected mass of bloggers is saying about a subject, and perhaps get a sense of who the mover and shakers who’re shaping the discussion are. They’re excellent (well, passably serviceable) as machine-readable metadata on a subject. They’re just no good for human. We naturally stay where the discussion is happening, where we can respond immediately, and in context.

I appreciate the response but why trackbacks don’t work properly still baffles me.

If Technorati were providing the Live Web that they claim to be, then wouldn’t that solve the immediacy problem?

The blog that started the topic would get its ping, and could then display my post underneath it as a comment almost right away.

Plus, I get to keep my comment on a site of my own.

Where I’m coming from is that that I want to own my own contributions rather than just blending in with the hordes posting their Amazon reviews or BBC Have Your Say bollocks.

So is it just the way trackbacks are implemented?

But your comment came up as a link on my blog fairly quickly.

Anyway.

Hope you’re keeping well!

Peter

>If Technorati were providing the Live Web that they claim to be, then wouldn’t that solve the immediacy problem?< Well, it would if everyone was using Technorati. Speaking for myself, I just don't like the site. Not really sure why.

>Where I’m coming from is that that I want to own my own contributions rather than just blending in with the hordes posting their Amazon reviews or BBC Have Your Say bollocks.<

I can completely understand that - it’s why I have my own blog, after all, but, there’s nothing to stop people from posting a comment, then recycling that comment into a blog post on their own site, but I feel that trackbacks provide less value to the wider (non-blogging) community, who’re probably better served by keeping the conversation in one place, than comments do. Trackbacks/fresh posts on a subject at other blogs only fragment the discussion, forcing people to hop across multiple sites to follow it and respond to different bits. I seem to recall one of the cardinal rules of Usenet being something like “Thou shalt not start a new thread every time you post”, which is sort of what the whole trackback business feels like.

If there were no non-trackback comments on any blog, if the only way to respond to anything was on your own blog, it’d probably be more workable, but I think the number of voices in any discussion would be also be correspondingly smaller.

But now I must head for home. Hope you’re all well at your place, too.

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