Is Trackback Dead?

At first I was disappointed that Blogger Beta didn’t offer trackbacks with its new upgrade. Trackback has been a core feature of blogging products for a long time now (it was first implemented by Movable Type), and it was always an annoying reminder to me that Blogger still had a lot of catching up to do. But now I’ve reconsidered that position and in some respects Blogger may have jumped ahead of the competition.

I notice that I don’t get as many trackbacks to my posts as I used to. But what really annoys me is I’ve noticed more and more glitches when trying to ping other blogs out there.

I’m not going to name any names but there have been many a Wordpress and TypePad blog that have refused to accept my trackbacks. They just grind away for awhile and then take me to an error message. Who knows, perhaps they consider the Bloke spam?

Personally I’m fed up with wasting my time on blogs that refuse trackbacks, and I may just stop doing it altogether. According to Wikipedia:

As a result, TrackBack spam filters similar to those implemented against comment spam now exist in many weblog publishing systems. Many blogs have stopped using trackbacks because dealing with spam became too burdensome.

So I’m really beginning to wonder if support for this feature is going the way of the dinosaur. What I think will replace it is Backlinks which is a feature supported by Blogger, and in some respects it may even be superior.

Why do I say that? Because unlike Trackback it is automatic and requires no extra work on my part. And I like that because I’m a lazy Bloke.

Even Technorati seems to get it and is offering something similar. So I have to applaud Blogger for enabling this innovation and I’m recommending that all of the other blogging platforms should get with the program and support it as well.

Blogging is all about the conversation, and any function that adds convenience, makes life easier, creates value for bloggers and encourages discussion within the blogosphere has a distinct advantage in my book.