Whither (wither?) Trackback?

A few years back, MovableType introduced Trackbacks. The idea is that if you (from a Trackback-enabled blogging package) included a link a post to a page which had Trackback code, that page would get a pinged database entry indicating the link and a snippet of it. Thus, you could see if someone linked to your posts. Sweet.

Of course, it’s something that link spammers can exploit (by sending bogus pings). Though various tools can control that to some extent (MT-Blacklist, for example), it’s not as easily controlled as spam on comments, due to how the Trackback system is set up (in MT, at least). And so, increasingly, I’ve seen people dropping Trackbacks from their blogs, and using (if they use anything) other, less hackable (and less powerful, IMO) solutions, as Les enumerates.

Which is a shame, because TBs are good stuff, both as a convenient way to see who’s commented on something you said (and removing the need for “I had comments on this, but they were too long, so I put them on my blog here” comments) and for internal cross-references (as I’ve started doing). I don’t intend to drop them any time soon — the link spam here has been pretty much under control of late, and I certainly hate to let the SOBs win.

That said, I think I am going to add a Technorati (“TR”) link in the comment footer of each post, so that it’s easy to see if there has been commentary on it (which, alas, has to be pulled, rather than getting pushed). That link, in MT, would seem to be:

http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&sub=mtcosmos&url=<$MTEntryLink$>

I don’t really “get” the Tagback proposal, though (bbintroducingtagback), and aren’t likely to do anything with it for a while until I do.

Anyway, I’m sorry to see TBs going away, because …

[continued a few hours later, once it’s pointed out that I ended mid-sentence]

… I think, conceptually, they’re pretty keen. Damned spammers …