Larry O' Brien asks Why is pingback / trackback a good design? One shortcoming of referrers is as Greg pointed out in the comments already: a page might contain a link to my site but no interesting commentary. I get lots of hits from a few blogrolls, but these people aren't saying anything except maybe that they read my site occasionally. A second shortcoming is that referrers aren't reliable in telling you when there is relevant content linking to you. Let's say I post this comment but nobody clicks through. If I had pingback/trackback enabled, you'd still know about it. This isn't all that unusual, in the case of this post, somebody might click through if they hadn't read your article already, or wasn't sure what I was referring to. If I'd quoted your entire article, or if they'd already read your article, they might not click through, and you'd still never know. The way around that is for me to post to the weblog and then visit my own weblog and click through so I'd know you saw at least one hit. Pingback / trackback automates that.

This problem doesn't seem all that much harder to me than syndicating and aggregating weblogs. In particular, both ends of the equation are likely to be behind a combination of firewalls, NAT, proxies, etc. Question to ponder: what technical, sociological, and legal innovations will be required to make this come about?[Sam Ruby]

How about economic innovations? When I saw this post I immediately thought of three local businesses I patronize: The Wine Seller, Angelo's Pizza, and Pablo's (my local coffee house). For these businesses to engage in this type of arrangement, it would either have to be extremely inexpensive, or would have to yield outsized results. I'm amazed at the crude technology that most small businesses employ, mostly for reasons of cost. Sure, Starbucks can afford this, but if it's just Starbucks, et.al., I'm not interested. What makes weblogs interesting is that publishers can run one affordably and even I get to find the Wine Sellers, Angelo's and Pablo's of the web. 3 years ago, I'd guess most of my HTTP requests went to yahoo.com. These days, intertwingly.net is beating Yahoo! hands down.

James Robertson responded to my last post on stored procedures and database portability, supporting the idea of using stored procedures over portability.  I agree with saying YAGNI to portability, unless that's your business plan.  For example, Andres' company builds tools for databases, so it doesn't make sense to tie themselves to a single vendor.  In the case where you get to dictate the DB, I think that the time is likely to be better spent elsewhere, if I thought my DB vendor was going to screw me or go belly up, that should automatically disqualify them.