This is good news for all bloggers. Someday soon trackbacks can be retired.

The greatest reason why this is good news is because pingbacks, unlike trackbacks, require us to do nothing. Trackbacks require you to copy and paste a special URL

As he suggests, “[pingback] is marginally less spammy than TrackBack”, but he has the greatest reason wrong. The reason why it is as implimented in in WordPress is because WordPress follows the “MAY requirement” — he has you there — of confirming that the link exists in the article that pung.

Regardless of how “many WordPress blogs out there, it would be a disservice to Movable Type users not to”. If you are using some other blogging platform that doesn’t automattically linkback articles using pinkback, ask them to end the madness (or give us something even better)of an experience that unnecessarily requires your work, trackback.

TrackBack is pretty broken as it stands today. The discovery mechanism is god-awful, and the protocol is prone to exploitation and spam. Generally speaking, given the percentage of TrackBacks that are spam, it makes me wonder why bother at all.

If you are a software developer I highly recommend you read the whole article, because it sounds like he is describing some problems with pingbacks and the opportunity for an even better linkback technology.

Mon, Feb 11 Update: Byrne explains that I was mistaken and that Trackback does have an autodiscover mechanism. Long before getting involved in WordPress someone explained it to me that those are the reason you see a special URL in Movable Type blogs was so you could copy and paste it and use it to link your article to that article’s comments, and I never questioned it.

This discussion leads me to the conclusion that there is no reason to include a “Trackback URL” visually in the viewers experience.