Trackbacking: knowledge sharing in the Blogisphere
Picture from http://mediamongrel.wordpress.com
Trackbacking is a simple and curteous way of notifying
a website when you publish an entry that references it.
Here is an easy to follow trackbacking tutorial for you
taken from the website below.
(http://www.optiniche.com/blog/117/wordpress-trackback-tutorial/)
The following article on Trackbacking may shed further light
on the process.
( http://campustechnology.com/articles/39510/)
TrackBack
Eons ago in the blogsphere, let’s see, that would be about August of 2002,
the good people at the company Movable Type released a new protocol.
The protocol is based on REpresentational State Transfer, a phrase
describing the essence of the Web’s architectural style. The idea of
TrackBack is to “push” communication between posts made on
different Weblogs.
Here’s how it works.
Someone, let’s say Tom, has written a post on his own Weblog that
comments on a post in another person’s Weblog, say Paula’s.
How d’es Paula know or learn about Tom’s interest and reference
to her post? Tom could have gone to Paula’s Weblog and posted
a note there saying he liked Paula’s comment and wrote about it
on his blog at http://toms_log.myblog.com.
However, this takes an extra degree of effort, and is just the sort of
communication barrier that keeps like-minded people from forming
communities.
What is needed is a form of remote comment—rather than posting
the comment directly on Paula’s Weblog, Tom posts his comment
about what Paula has written on his own Weblog, then he sends a
TrackBack ping to notify Paula.
A TrackBack ping is blogspeak for a short message sent from one
Web server to another. What does this accomplish? Paula can now
list all the sites that have referenced her erudite prose on her
Web site. This lets those browsing her Weblog read all the reactions
to her posting from wherever they were written and posted
around the Web. Among those listed, of course, would be
Tom’s. Because this information is in machine-readable format
(the ping message), software tools can read them and draw the Web
of interaction around this particular posted topic automatically.
The point of all this is to make explicit the connections between ideas
(postings) and minimize the effort a browsing member of the blogging
community has to expend—they don’t have to explicitly click on each
referenced blog URL to read the set of related postings about
Paula’s expository prose.
The TrackBack protocol is an open set of communication rules,
thus letting vendors of many different blogging engines develop
their piece of comparable functionality.
