Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

Apparently Zawodny thinks trackback is dead:

I’m convinced now more than ever. But I’ll spare you all long
rant about why it’s dead, since others have already written this for me:

• Trackback is dead. Are Comments dead too?
• Trackback is dead, Use PubSub
• Trackback really is dead - Sorry Elliott et al

I’ve always felt that the case for trackback was a difficult one to make. One problem is that trackbacks are essentially automated comments.

Why not just provide a web comment API? No one has been working on this really and it’s a bit shocking that it’s 2005 and we still don’t have a way to syndicate comments (granted WordPress has a strong implementation of wfw:comments but that’s only one provider). Given a permalink why can’t I get a list of comments? Why can’t I post a comment through NetNewsWire or Ecto? I can send a trackback via Ecto but only with reduced metadata (the extract, not the full text).

I still don’t feel that Pubsub, Technorati, IceRocket, or Feedster are the answer. This just adds a brittle centralized man in the middle which can break when you least expect it.

Neither of these will be fixed anytime soon though. Link tracking services will still be fragile and comment APIs won’t take off (I’m obviously jaded).

Update:

The RSS Weblog has some thoughts:

Personally, I think TrackBacks foster self-promotion more than dialogue. Spam aside, linking offsite to follow the conversation is just too disruptive.