Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

At Musings today distler notes how useful trackbacks are for commenting externally on web content in general. Zawodny, however, proclaims Trackback dead.

Now, you may not know this, but the penguin, through the magic of my external trackback handler will actually send out trackbacks and pingbacks it can autodiscover. While we could accept incoming trackbacks, it has just never been hooked into the legacy PHP code as we work on the Java version. Anyway...

Trackback is a really great thing. Jeremy is right that Technorati is better in the world of, well, most blogs at this point. However, like FeedSter or PubSub is really dependent on the database knowing to query a website, whereas Trackback and Pingback are based on an active notification from the commenter. There is a real advantage to the second point. Pingback does have signifigant advantages over Trackback, however, the fact that Pingback doesn't encode a function GUID in its autodiscovery system the way Trackback's embedded RDF does is a real drawback. It means that "singular" content hosted at mutliple URLS (for instance, you can hit this article via www.screaming-penguin.com, screaming-penguin.com, totsp.com or www.totsp.com URLS) can be problematic since, to spec, the URL being referenced is an XML-RPC argument, rather than something encoded in the "hit" URL itself.

Now, Google and (I believe) Yahoo support the new rel="nofollow" which is intended to cut back on, or at least render ineffective, trackback spam. In distlers case, the Trackback receiver simply maintains a whitelist of known good linkers. Of course things like MT-Blacklist can also help manage this, but it is always going to be a problem.