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.
| This entry was posted on Saturday, April 30th, 2005 at 8:56 pm and is tagged with sideeffect, php library, technorati, middleman, blog entry, caches, pundits, ajax, citations, remedy, conversations, perspective, blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
5 Responses to “Trackback not Dead”
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(Aside: I despise the acronym AJAX)
There’s no need for Javascript at all.
XMLRPC queries would suffice.
If you query from the server code, the user has to wait for the queries to return, or timeout. If you do it with client side javascript, you get no wait, and the commentary appears when it’s ready, or not all. Of course, for any idea, there are 1000 good ways to implement it
I prefer server-side because I fundamentally don’t trust clients.
But thats not to say your way isn’t good, too.
I’d write a server-side query where it writes to a DIV which is already positioned where it should be on the screen, with the actual queries at the very end of code’s execution, with errors supressed by the @ operator.
That way, if the queries failed, they’d not generate messages, and the bulk of the page would have already been pushed out to the client anyway.
Trackback really is dead - Sorry Elliott et al
From a user point of view: Nobody understands it. One of the questions I get constantly is what is Trackback? And I get this questions from both new and veteran bloggers.
One issue I have with Trackback is that, while it’s a decent idea, it doesn’t ever seem to be correctly implemented anywhere.
Whenever I send trackbacks from Wordpress, I always get the comment in the receiving blog looking something like
Trendyblog >> Blog Archives >> March >> Post Title
[...] because the result of these activities tends towards a feeling of [...]
the point that example is making is that it adds absolutely no useful information to the discussion, other than a link, and an incomprehensible, seemingly-randomly-selected blurb of text.
I’ve even tried filling in the exerpt field, and it doesn’t actually use it, it still sends a snippit that’s nonsensical.
Maybe I’ll get around to modifying Wordpress’ code to use the exerpt field, but I don’t think I should have to do that — it should follow some logical behavior in the first place.