http://daringfireball.net/2003/06/takeyourtrackbacksanddangle

http://daringfireball.net/2003/06/trackback_addenda

I agree that a “threaded” or otherwise centralized view of the flow of conversation would be incredible. But I don’t want to shut out non-trackback using tools. The referrer is common across all web-platforms — it’s just links, after all!

That being said, for tools that don’t do trackback, you can use Simpletracks: http://kalsey.com/tools/trackback/

I’ve written up these comments on my website as well, which doesn’t do trackback: http://www.bmannconsulting.com/node/view/1138

About the post–not all weblog publishing tools support Trackback, either by default or handling the URLs automagically. I use Radio Userland (http://radio.userland.com/) and it will read the source URL and look for a link reference to the source Trackback, but it’s only had that feature for about six months.

About me–I called you a couple of months ago after reviewing old mail from the late 1990s regarding a domain name you used to own. We talked about weblogs then and I was disappointed when you didn’t have one going. I’m thrilled to have found you (via a weblog called Stupid Simple Blog–http://www.stupidsimple.com/blog/). I’m subscribed and welcome to the blogosphere.

PS–Surf over to Technorati. It’s a Google for weblogs and more.

Steve Kirks

Personally I love trackback as it’s responsive, not passive (unlike the methods above where I need to go search it out).

Boris — I don’t buy the argument that because not everyone can play in the sandbox, no one should. There are obvious benefits to linking everything together. We should figure out how to make that happen — effortlessly. Agreed, trackback is not ideal. While I really dig Technorati — I’d prefer a distributed design to a centralized one.

Refer logs sound promising, but I’m already getting some garbage in my logs — I expect that to get worse. Need a way to filter that out.

The other issue I have with referrers is the referrer doesn’t tell me which post was referred to, just the page. But, yeah TBL was thinking way ahead by building referer into the HTTP header. (To bad it’s misspelled!) We should use it. It’s about time it got used for something more than tracking ad click-thrus and search rankings.