Cogblog

There is nothing more fun that creating community in the blogosphere by linking to conversations relevant to your own.  Allow me to demonstrate:  Marc Andreesen does a post on how he doesn’t need comments, he has trackbacks.  His trackback URL for that post is: http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2472308/19936064 - a URL I hate.  I much prefer the trackbacks that are formatted like: http://cogmap.com/blog/2007/06/17/organization-chart-api-xoxo-xml-charts/trackback/ where /trackback/ is appended to the original URL name.  This allows me to only have to cut and paste a single URL (the original post URL, which I then link to).

So, to continue the story, Fred Wilson responds to Marc’s original post with a post on how comments are key to community. Of course, he doesn’t even have trackbacks on his blog, so that is like me telling Martians that Mars is a terrible place to live.  Also, it makes me sad because I comment on his posts all over my blog.

I am pro-trackbacks because I want to own my comments.  I like to comment in the context of my blog, my topics, and my identity, and then create a hyperlinked world of trackbacks.  Also, it shares the Google-juice.

Anyway…

I wish that WordPress scraped my blog posts when I posted them, found posts I linked to, scraped the trackbacks and then pinged them for me.  I don’t like having to copy and paste both the URL I link to and the trackback URL.

This may sound like I am lazy, but I always was a believer that lazy points the way to future code.

Especially given that most of the blogs these days seem to be Wordpress, you could express the trackback as some XML in a post and then simply munch it up and spit it out.  Platform ubiquity equals ease of integration!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 6:55 am and is filed under Theories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.