Comments on: Syllabus onTrackBack: What Train? Wrong Track?

By: Scott Leslie

Scott Leslie — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

If I understand correctly what he’s suggesting is something like the Internet Topic Exchange (http://topicexchange.com/), which provides a ping address for various topics and thus aggregates any articles that people post and ping that page.

The problem I find with the Internet Topic Exchange is that it kind of defeats one of the main aspects of blogs, which is to attach posts to specific identities/blogs - I follow the ’social software’ feed at the Internet Topic Exchange but honestly 4/5 of what comes through is, for me, cruft and not channels I would follow or am that interested in to begin with, though the idea of a topic exchange on social software seems appealing.

Cheers, Scott.

By: Greg

Greg — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

In fact, the trackback approach to content aggregation was one of the original use cases, according to its creator, Ben Trott:

“Person A has written a post on a topic that a group of people are interested in. This is a form of content aggregation–by sending a TrackBack ping to a central server, visitors can read all posts about that topic. For example, imagine a site which collects weblog posts about Justin Timberlake. Anyone interested in reading about JT could look at this site to keep updated on what other webloggers were saying about his new album, a photo shoot in a magazine, etc.”

From http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/beginners/

By: Alan Levine

Alan Levine — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Good points both Scott and Greg– however to me it still begs 2 questions:

(1) Whoi is the central server authority on a topic or topics? The first one posted? It sets up problems of information discovery.

(2) What is going to compel people writing new content to manually send the pings? They would have to know which central authority (#1) to send the ping and be dedicated enough to do so.

By: Scott Leslie

Scott Leslie — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Yeah, don’t get me wrong - I actually don’t think the scenario he lays out for aggregation is necessarily a great model, and I think the two points you raise are good objections. I was just commenting that it was already being used in this fashion, IMHO to not the greatest effect.

For me the use that makes more sense and is more effective is the ‘automatic’ trackback pinging that occurs when an trackback enabled article (or learning object!!) is referenced elsewhere, leaving a trail of re-uses/re-contextualizations. In the LO world, you can see something similar in MERLOT in their notion of ‘personal collections’ and being able to see for each object which personal collections it shows up in. Cheers, Scott.

By: Alan Levine

Alan Levine — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I do like the concept of MERLOT collections, though I’ve not really looked at them to see how they are used- they could end up being as unorganized as browser bookmarks/favorites, and thus what you end up with are various sized piles of objects– it is not a re-contextualizing of objects– noire like the tools that let you know who’s RSS feeds include your blog.

By: As I May Think...

As I May Think... — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Is Trackback Obsolete? PubSub Enables the bi-directional web

Is TrackBack obsolete? Is it just an artifact of the limitations of the early blogosphere — before there was support for real-time matching of blog content such as that provided by PubSub.com? TrackBack allows writers to build links from