A Blog About Making Culture
explaining trackback
March 21, 2003
After noticing that both David and Doc were having trouble understanding TrackBack, I tried to write up a brief explanation, as I understand it, of how the protocol works. Since it was of use to them, I thought I'd repost it for any others who remain confused.
Hopefully I got it right, or else I expect Mena will come over here and correct me in the comments.
Just noticed you said you were still a bit in the dark about TrackBack. If that's still the case, I think I can explain it to you simply. TrackBack's just a protocol for one web server to talk to another. The problem is, people have confused the protocol for one of its implementations.
Right now, the main use of the protocol is to have someone else's web server tell yours about a message that's been posted. My server says, "Anil wrote about your post on Thursday." That works basically like remote comments, and maybe even ought to be displayed the same way that comments are, only linked to the remote site instead of displayed inline.
Another use of TrackBack, which is just starting to catch on, is for everyone writing about a topic to ping a central place with their comments. These category-based or aggregating TrackBacks are great. Imagine a TrackBack-enabled centralized category system, where any post that people on the system make to their "music" category gets pinged to a central music category page. You'd have all the blog entries of all those people, all in one place, by topic. Maybe you could filter it using OPML and FOAF to just those people who are 2 degrees away from your blogroll. Cool stuff.
Examples of category-based TrackBack aggregation pages:
notes from people who were at SXSW this year
a similar thing for the ORA OS X Con last year
Previously: well, excuuuse me
WE ARE HUGH
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Some great examples of the centralized TrackBack collection sites:
http://topicexchange.com/topics
And similar to your “music” example, there’s a book-related trackback page at allconsuming:
http://allconsuming.net/trackbook.html
And here’s just one example of how Shelley Powers has has been extending (make more 2-way) how trackbacks can be used:
http://weblog.burningbird.net/fires/000838.htm
Thanks for writing this out Anil, as TrackBacks haven’t had much in the way of a simple explanation. Still, I think the best lesson is almost just turning it on, and sending a ping to someone, or even to one of your own entries, just to see it working.
Anil
Thanks for those examples, Bill. I liked all of those implementations, but hadn’t covered them because the email was a basic intro. Maybe I’ll write up a whole “intro to TrackBack” and include those.
Marc Canter
The bombs are dropping on live TV, but I’m taking out some time to say “Thank you Anil” as well. Now if Radio just had away of doing that, I’d be rocking.
Bill
I understand the need to keep it simple for now, but your hinting at writing a longer intro to TrackBack brings up an interesting question.
Do you think it would be more interesting to read (and contribute to) a user-written introduction to TrackBack, or one put together by Ben and Mena. Not that they wouldn’t do a fantastic job, which they would, but since so many people have developed some interesting uses of TrackBack, I think I’d almost like to hear their views on and uses of TB rather than a simple “here’s what TB is.”
It would be a “here’s how TB works, and here’s how and why I use it” kind of document. A “best practices” document, if you will.
mathowie
Actually Anil, the URL to everyone posting about SXSW is at the the SXSWTrack page
Ryan
I really think Matt’s (and others) work with trackback from other apps (winamp, itunes) is quite interesting. And would point out that it doesn’t need to be just webserver-to-webserver.
Michael
I think many people are confused about TrackBack, even with your post.
I wrote up a simple explanation (with pictures) of how TrackBack works on my site.
Hopefully, it’s useful.
mathowie
Dave and Doc are technically minded people, so they should understand the following that no one so far has mentioned (consider it “how to explain trackback to programmers”):
Trackback is a REST-based architecture for sharing references related sites or bits of information. Using simple URL variables, if I was going to make a new blog entry about something you said, trackback allows me to let you know on your site that I did so (otherwise you’d have to search your referers or check technorati or something to know). That’s the most basic usage.
You can also use it to collect pointers to posts on a subject. So if I setup a central site about the war in Iraq, I could ask everyone making war-related posts to ping my central site’s URL so I can track them back. Like the previous example, the person is writing a post about something on my site, but it wasn’t an entry that sparked it, it was a central point to talk about a subject. In this configuration, the only point is convenience, so that others can come to the site to see what everyone is saying about a subject. It works as an opt-in aggregator of related content (opt-in because everyone participating willingly does this).
There are some more advanced uses of it, and thanks to it being (in the nuts and bolts sense) a way to use simple URL variables to dump info into a remote database structure, you can do all sorts of other things. I send my current playing mp3 to my blog via trackback by capitalizing on the URL variables in the request, and also on what I output. I also have a “posted elsewhere” mini-blog on my site that is a collection of trackbacks I write myself, to provide pointers to other places (like this).
Who knows what people will do in the future with Trackback, but for now it’s a great way to create links among the conversations happening among and between weblogs, it’s a great aggregator, and it’s a great way to hack out any small db-driven part of a site.
Oliver
I’m also using TrackBack to power The American Times
Liz
Would be nice to see some user-annotated documentation on blogging tools like MOvable Type. Similar to what’s on php.net, where the clarifications and examples provided by commenters are often more useful than the docs themselves.
Anil
Liz, I love that idea, I’d suggested the same to Ben and Mena myself, so hopefully we’ll see that in the future.
Anonymous
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Mena
We posted a tutorial to help clarify things.
JimmyT
Ok, I might be a simpleton, and certainly am not up how the technology works, but the way I describe Trackback is “smart commenting”. I am commenting to your post now. My words live on your server. I don’t know if anyone responds to this comment unless I come back to check.
If instead I trackback to your post, then I write my comments on my page (and probably have to do a better and clearer job for folks tuning in from my end) and then trackback/ping you. If all goes well, you or anyone else who might want to comment my comment will trackback to me. Now, a growing web of comments and criticism forms, in a way that is fairly simply transversable, and the words that I write stay where they should, in my space, where I can be responsable for them.
I’m all over the idea of a central trackback system — I’m calling it trackforward, where I write about something that I know others will be interested in — once I ping the central server, it’s smart enough to ping/track to other blogs who are also writing and talking about the same topic. The trick is to create a solid keyword/linking system.
Anyway, that’s as I understand it all, and could very well be missing the real power of the system.
Kate S.
For cryin’ out loud. I’ve been researching (stalking) blogs for 2 mos. now to get an idea of how I want to set up mine. I’m JUST starting to get a sense of all this chit, and then I stumble, innnocently, onto this posting.
I just dropped out of the sky into a foreign country and I don’t have a clue what language is being spoken.
Not only that, but it has been suggested by Her Most Surliness that most people who post write nothing worth reading and do so only to see their names in print.
And here I was thinking: comments are sometimes are the best part of the posting. They introduce and link us to a world of undiscovered talent, they provide insight, inspiration, an opportunity for reflection and revision, and are often very telling of the commentors themselves.
I just dropped from the sky and I am clueless, without a Geek/Dummy-Dummy/Geek Dictionary.
And since you were my first blushing, referred to me by a good friend (PBS), I will keep you bookmarked, but—- I think I’m gonna go lay down, now.
Boris
It’s not a protocol. It’s a mechanism.
All it takes for a system to use TBs is somewhere to store the ping data (in a database for example) and some code to process it.
Originally the idea was for it to be used as remote commenting (I comment a post on your blog by blogging about it on my blog and having my blog send your blog a notification thereof.)
The only role the webserver playes is to provide access to the HTTP protocol.
Clear as cheese, no?
I think a drawing is in order… :)
Albert Bibingo
“It’s not because of fate, it’s because of Tequila” That may be the best thing I have ever read in my whole life!
Albert Bibingo
“It’s not because of fate, it’s because of Tequila” That may be the best thing I have ever read in my whole life!
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