Top Coates starts a conversation about trackback and whether it’s dead in the water. He states “I don’t think this problem can be solved by engaging in the arms race” and I have to agree that once you’re a spammer target you’re well and truly fucked. My activity logs for each day show I get absolutely pummeled by attempted spams from various bots. Even though I have comments and trackback turned off they still smack themselves off my server daily.
I do think though that comments and trackbacks have been very beneficial to starting and sustaining conversations and some better system is needed. Perhaps Tom’s post will bring Trackback Version 2.0 or something like this. I do find trackbacks are a marvellous thing. They’re an immediate way of letting the person you’re reading know that you’re sending them link karma for their latest post. We need to keep letting know they’re being read without having them resort to server logs and we need to let them know what we think of what they wrote too.
I don’t have comments or trackback enabled as I said above but I manage to see what the irishblogs are saying about me via Planet of the Blogs and via a pubsub rss feed.