Trackback not Dead
Even though pundits have been saying that trackback is dead, the idea of using Technorati or another external tool to track citations and interactions is just too clumsy for me to accept. The point of trackback is arguably to extend conversations over multiple blogs–which Technorati does–but it has the desireable sideeffect of directly linking to the commenting blog. This removes the middleman, Technorati, and optimizes a readers flow. Instead of having to click on a “read commentary on Technorati” link, wait for and browse the list of commenting blogs, and finally choose an article to view, they travel directly to the commentary. From a user perspective, this is important.
The Remedy:
An AJAX solution would work well here. Code some javascript to directly insert the text of the blog entry which is commenting on a post by sending a request to a PHP library that calls and caches Technorati results for your blog posts. Then you read who’s talking about you from the original entry, only visiting another site if and only if you, the user, is sufficiently intrigued.
Adsense Placement Optimization–from Google
Google offers this new Adsense placement guide:
Kudos to awesome blog http://www.jensense.com/ for pointing this out. And a random link to me.
