What about TrackBack?.
While I was in the hospital in June, the Movable Type folks implemented a feature called TrackBack.
I'm not exactly sure all that it can do, but here's at least part of the story. (I'm posting this so I can get corrected if I don't understand the feature. It occurs to me that this post could use the feature, heh.)
Anyone, anywhere can send a message to any Movable Type server to associate a URL with a weblog post. That URL will be shown in the list of TrackBack links for the post.
Further, based on an email from Matt Mower, for some reason that I don't understand, this can only work with Movable Type servers. I doubt this, because from all outward appearances it is using HTTP, which could be emulated by any program capable of doing HTTP. Matt thinks this feature should be implemented with XML-RPC. I'm not sure it'll take off no matter what it's implemented in.
Here's the problem. By design it seems to assume that everyone plays fair. But eventually we all attract a relatively small number of people who would mark up every post with trash talk, if given the chance to. It's a predictable process. That's why I don't have a discussion group here (I used to), or a comments feature. It's why MSNBC is moving to weblogs over discussion software. It's basically why weblogs have a future for thoughtful discourse where mail-list-like collaboration tools are dead-ends. When I think about evolving weblogs, I try to avoid features that turn them into discussion groups.
Follow-up: A page of non-Movable Type implementations of TrackBack. Hit-Or-Miss implemented it. BlogRoots has a page called BlogPopuli that's based on TrackBack. They have a tutorial that's only for people who run Movable Type, and have a ping form. Do a view source on the ping form to see how to do it programmatically. Not sure if all TrackBack-capable sites support this form (probably not). Thanks to Anil Dash and Megnut for the pointers and info.
Rahul Dave: "Tracking can be simpler, and per choice, less noisy than trackback."
Evan: "Wouldn't it be neat if I could somehow automatically link this post to Dave's post?"
Dave: "What's so great about automatic?" [Scripting News]
6:21:21 PM 
|
