Pingback via Dave: The development of blogs as a semi-structured forum for online discussion continues. Pingback is likely a much better method of gathering references than by using referrers, which are quite noisy (due to bots, search engines, and more). It also affords the opportunity of getting a more targeted permalink to the referenced comment, assuming of course that the originator properly tagged their post - which is not always the case.
So, how long before someone implements a blog UI that resembles a standard topic/response outline/tree discussion format? I've got mixed feelings when I try to look ahead: I don't see how such protocols might handle nested response-to-responses, and then how long before we see "auto pingback generator" spambots? Then, counter-spam "allow lists" and "deny lists", reputation mechanisms, and ... then we'll find that all we've done is to decentralize the same old centralized discussion mechanism.
I don't have a Discuss link on this blog for a reason: I think that it's a Good Thing that this blog medium is different than a traditional electronic discussion medium - relying on human mechanisms to "spread the word" about interesting referrals, rather than technical mechanisms. I do scan my referrals once in a while to see if there's something that I'm missing, or to get a feel for the quantity of the flow coming from a certain source. I do look at the WebTrends reports on my site, because it gives me a good feeling for what time of day people look at the site, or from what countries or companies. These are great uses of automation. But for organizing discussion .. I'm thinking right now that I'd prefer to stick with human talkback rather than automated pingback. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]
