Commentary.
March 8th, 2006
The purpose of Trackback and Pingback is simple: Find out when people are talking about you without a lot of heavy lifting (e.g. manually posting a comment or dropping an email) on either side. And yet here’s John Gruber, discovering the comments of venerable Web designer and personality Derek Powazek, by skimming Derek’s del.icio.us bookmarks. (Actually, JG was probably skimming all del.icio.us bookmarks for his own story.) This is a pretty fragile thread to try to follow. How many places do I need to look to see if someone’s commenting on something I wrote? Will Technorati be enough? Do I have to go back to obsessing over my referrer logs?