Six Apart, TrackBack as an Internet Standard, and How To Conduct Conversations

SixApart is trying to have Trackback adopted as an Internet standard, and I hope that they do exactly what they set out to do:

[from Six Apart - ProNet - Submitting TrackBack as an Internet Standard]

As many familiar with the protocol will attest, TrackBack, despite its wide market adoption, is far from perfect — largely due to the fact that TrackBack was invented for a blogosphere that was much different in size and makeup. Today, blogging has exploded in popularity, presenting TrackBack with a whole new set of challenges to address. Specifically, those challenges include the need for:

* Standardization

* Protocol Extensibility

* Authentication

* Better documentation

Since TrackBack was invented, little has been done to secure TrackBack to prevent people from abusing it and generating unsolicited, unwanted, and ultimately irrelevant “TrackBack Spam.” Managing unwanted TrackBacks takes time away from bloggers and blog hosting services that could be better spent elsewhere.

Also, over the years, a number of protocols have emerged to service roughly the same set of problems as TrackBacks — to inform resources and services on the Internet of the availability of new content. TrackBack and “update pings” have a lot in common, and the industry could benefit a great deal by simplifying and potentially merging them into a single and cohesive standard.

Trackback, within the technologies that SixApart has fielded — Moveable Type and Typepad — definitely feels like an afterthought. But a much needed one, nonetheless. Standardization would likely clean up some of the rough edges and inconsistencies in implementation.

For my part, I look forward to the ubiquity of trackback in all blogging platforms so that new models of intercommunication between blogs can be resolved. The recent furor about the supposedly key role of comments in blogging — is they is, or is they ain’t? — really rests on the relatively primitive way that conversation goes on in blogs. We can imagine more sophisticated techniques to present threaded discussions: for example, what if all ‘comments’ were actually a specialized form of blog post, hosted by the ‘comment’ writer’s blog, using trackback as the linking mechanism? I would then not need CoComment to find all my orphaned comments, and better blog tools could represent the give-and-take of blog discussions in something richer than the flat sequence of comments in today’s blog posts.

[I also have an ax to grind about the implementation of tags, a la Technorati: namely, I think that T’rati and other services that identify tags in our posts should ping our blogs with trackbacks, so that readers can see what services have linked to the posts, which would make it easy to jump to those services’ tagspaces. This Open Tags model relies on a uniform and ubiquitous trackback solution, too. But that is a post for another day.]

At any rate, I applaud SixApart for taking the lead in this area, and in the original innovation behind it.