Trackbacks with messages
As we know the trackback field enables you to ping blog posts when you publish your blog post. When you publish your blog post the posts you have pinged will have a link in the footer of their post. They will probably be alerted by email that someone has pinged their post.
NOTE: You don’t have to ping some just because you are talking about them in your post, you could just be pinging them because you want them to check out your post.
In an earlier post I also noted that if you can’t find a post to ping, just ping their “about” page…read on about category trackback posts.
Anyway my futher idea is what if you could leave a message about why you are tracking them back all within the trackback.
The receivers blog post will have a trackback link from your post accompanied by a brief message about the reason they are sending you a trackback.
Is this possible?
![email.png](http://services.nexodyne.com/email/icon/GxbiQvgbwBgCnw%3D%3D/oIp%2BJMQ%3D/R01haWw%3D/0/image.png"){kind=icon}
“NOTE: You don’t have to ping some just because you are talking about them in your post, you could just be pinging them because you want them to check out your post.”
You don’t? Really?
My take is that this tool is for “tracking back” to the post that inspired yours… and that as such there has to be a link. Anything else is spam / abuse, & ought to be an e-mail, unless (as you’ve said recently) a way is developed to ping a site & not a post.
Comment by John — July 14, 2006 @ 6:31 pm
John,
I guess I was thinking too honestly…I was thinking in the realm of pinging a friend. Instead of having to email them afterwards, I thought it could be easy doing at the same time as publishing a post (even if you are not refering to them in your post).
But of course this may be incorrect and lead to spam and abuse, I wasn’t thinking in the big picture.
Also this blurs the distinction between pinging and trackbacks, I suppose trackbacks are a type of pinging, that type where you let someonw know that you are refering to one of their posts in your post.
Although as you say this kind of system would work if you are tracking back the site in general, eg. the “about” page…and that the owner of the about page is cool with you using it for that purpose. Blogs like 3spots offer us to use it for that purpose.
I guess this activity would work exactly like trackback, but would be for a different purpose, so it would need a different name like pingback or pingsite, etc…
Comment by Johnt — July 15, 2006 @ 8:04 am