Big Media Offers Trackbacks To Bloggers Republic
Sep 25, 2004 Blog General
I was visiting one of the blogs I visit frequently when I skimmed a headline that almost made Mt. Dew come out of my nose: CNET News.com supports Trackback and Pingback. Yikes! Is this for real? A big media outlet connecting to the independent publishing world in such a way, that’s it’s like the High School quarterback hanging out with the chess club…and playing chess. Trackbacks are the livelyhood of most blogs. They are used to say “Hey, I liked what I saw, I wrote my thoughts too. Thanks for the story idea.” It’s a method for a site to automatically indicate to another site that you linked back to them. Thus, called a track back.
CNET linking back to individual readers is a potential risk. Without moderation (as most blogs and independent sites are well aware), trackbacks can be severely abused. Spammers are starting to discover this method of instant linkage. Luckily, b2evolution (the blog software I use) has an antispam solution that is worth a whole lot more than I paid for it (free).
Les discovered the News.com trackback tests through Photo Matt, who aparently never looks at just the surface of a website. He discovered, maybe he was tipped off, the link rel=”pingback” in the HTML headers. There it was for anyone to see–PINGBACK! Through some mild reverse engineering, he shows you how you too can see all the sites that have pingbacked to a particular article. Nice digging, Matt! Now if we could get the wires in on the act.
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