Over and over again people - tjeck Darren’s comment’s - are in doubt in using trackbacks on their weblogs. The excuse is that it’s difficult to explain for common people.
If that’s right I want to promote and explain what trackback-functionality is all about:
In using weblogs, you have likely seen the word “TrackBack” or “TrackBack URL”- this post will help you understand what TrackBack is, why it exists and how to use it, in Plain English.
The folks at Six Apart designed TrackBack and they offer a great beginner’s guide here. My intent is to present TrackBack in my own words using descriptions from my perspective.
An Introduction:
TrackBack could be compared to carbon copying someone on an email. Suppose you write an email to your manager and talk specifically about a person on your project team. In this case, you’d like the person mentioned in the email to be aware that you mentioned them, so you add their email address to the “CC:” line of the email. This let’s them know- “I’m talking about you, and I want you to know.”
In the weblog world, TrackBacks accomplish the same type of notification (also called a “ping”). It allows one weblogger to notify the other in an effort to say “I’m talking about you, and I want you to know.” Instead of a carbon copy on an email, the weblogger uses a special URL (called a TrackBack) that sends a notification to the specific weblog entry it would like to notify.
Personally I think Trackback is a core functionality of weblogging - it’s about displaying where the conversation is happening - on other weblogs, maybe with a different twist, but still ..
It gives you different perspectives, it shows different reflections - YES, it is core.
Thank you Lee for the explanation!
NB.
Lee didn’t leave me the possibility to track my conversation back to his post - to bad. I’m sorry for that.
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