Trackbacks are Dead.
Jeremy Zawadny started it today with a "Trackback is Dead" post called "Trackback is Dead", drawing some great comments. Anil Dash, Six Apart bastion, wrote a reasoned rebuttal (not as a trackback--bummer) which drew out some real A-Listers of the blogosphere.
In my mind, trackback is very dead for all of the reasons that Grant says in his comment. There's on my weblog as a curiosity and to make sure the Radio macro works correctly. Right now, it works but the server doesn't--it's my server, not UserLand's and it's my fault--long story.
The real gem here is this comment by Phil Ringnalda:
"I'm willing to tolerate a few false positives, so I've just been rejecting any trackback ping from a source that doesn't have the RDF to support trackback autodiscovery in reply for a year and a half now. In that time, I've gotten exactly one trackback spam..."
I read that and fired off a quick email to Jake with the link. He thinks it's worth looking at Radio's code to make sure we're doing something similar.
A side note: trackbacks are a good distributed system similar to fallout shelters of the 50's. At the time, we really needed them, but now with the rise of Technorati, Feedster and PubSub, we have something much better than trackback. We should never forget that we have the tools to create these links on our own, but let's retire it to the woodshed for awhile.