Collaboration and TrackBack/Pingback

After thinking some more about yesterday’s post, I have some more thoughts. Sam Gentile mentioned that weblogs seem to work better for people than more direct interactions; so why not embrace this, and see if we can get more out of weblogs? It might not get Sam all the way to where he wants to be, but it would certainly be better than where we are now.

Let’s take this discussion for example. Sam made his initial post yesterday sometime, and got a couple of replies (mine and Sam Ruby’s) that I knew about quickly. But what about others? Rahul also replied, but I only found it by searching Technorati. Similarly, unless Sam decides to link to these posts, many of his readers will never know about them. Sam does, because I know he religiously scans his referrer logs :-), but no one else will know.

So how to fix this? It seems to me TrackBack or Pingback is the way to go. Automated notifications between weblogs, encouraging more widespread collaboration. As far as I know, Movable Type users already get this for free, if they enable it. For Radio folks, Google reveals a couple of people doing it, albeit with a bit more work.

So, everyone, how about implementing TrackBack and/or Pingback on your weblogs - and let’s see where it takes us?