Defogging Blogging: Trackback - A Guide for Suburban Hen

There was a comment on this blog last week from Suburban Hen :

“And I never have understood trackback. What do I do? click it? I’ll do that…” (link)

So, just for Suburban Hen because she lives in Nottingham (nice place but too many thugs among the criminal element and vindictive swines among the traffic wardens), here is my guide to trackback. I’m going to start with the Blogosphere, and then explain the place of trackback.

What is The Blogosphere?

My short summary:

“Blogosphere: The network of interlinked websites and related virtual conversation forum comprised of blogs.”

Wikipedia’s slightly longer summary:

“Blogosphere is the collective term encompassing all blogs as a community or social network.

The notion of a blogosphere is an important one for understanding blogs. Blogs by themselves are simply the published text of an author’s thoughts, but the authors read and comment on others’ blogs, link to them and cite them. These relationships between blogs compromise a shifting Internet-wide social and cultural network.”

What are Comments and Trackbacks

A way to respond to an article

If I publish an article on my blog that you find interesting, you can respond in several ways:

1. Make a phone call.
2. Send me an email.
3. Put a comment on the article itself on my blog.
4. Write an article in response on your blog, including a quote from the article with a link back to the original article on my blog.

Here, we are interested in the last two options - making a comment, or writing an article.

But we have a problem

There is a problem, in that the dialogue involves 2 different websites:

1. If you make a comment on my blog, a visitor to your blog has no way of knowing that you have made it.
2. If you write an article on your blog, a visitor reading my blog has no way of knowing that you have responded.

Comments and Trackbacks are a way of continuing the conversation. A comment is self-explanatory - I actually couldn’t find a short article about blog comments (anyone care to write one?).

A trackback is best described as a “remote comment linked to the original article”.

Try it out - manual trackback

Try this on this article. I’m quite happy for you to practice (it will help me to have more links!).

1. Write an article on your blog referencing this article.
2. Revisit this article.
3. Put an abstract of your article and a link to your article into a comment.

The comment would be a manual trackback.

So, to boil it down - a trackback is a pointer on one article that points to a response that has been posted somewhere else.

Automated trackback

Some blogging software can do better than this. If you are able to do an automated trackback, it will include the same elements:

1. Your site name.
2. Your article title.
3. A short abstract or excerpt of your article.
4. The URL (web address) of your article.

Usually, you will see a trackback appear within minutes. however, the owner of the target of your trackback may have set their blog to require manual approval of trackbacks, or have disallowed them altogether. In the latter case, you may be able to make a comment instead.

Blogging software has the capability to both make, and respond to, trackback requests automatically. Wordpress is good in this respect, Blogger is not very good.

I’ll return to this subject in a Defogging Blogging future article.

Further Reference

The (good at this time) Wikipedia articles on Trackbacks and Linkbacks talks about trackbacks.

For those wanting to learn more now, there is an excellent tutorial about trackbacks in Wordpress on the OptiNiche Blog.

Tags: blog comment, defogging blogging, manual trackback, suburban hen, definition of blogosphere, optiniche, trackback tutorial, what is trackback

[tags] blog comment, defogging blogging, manual trackback, suburban hen, definition of blogosphere, optiniche, trackback tutorial, what is trackback [/tags]