Trackback sixlog-style
I saw yesterday on Mena’s blog that her and Ben were going to start blogging general technology things at their new blog called Six Log (named for Six Apart, their company—but I’m not sure why its Six Apart!)
Anyhow, I really enjoyed Mena’s post of this evening, TrackBack and Cross-Weblog threading. Here’s one point that I particurly was interested in:
Although I do think that the method of post TrackBacking can be improved and must be made simpler (and more second-nature), I do not believe that automation should come at the price of understanding context. The extra effort it takes to send a ping guarantees that there is more or less an implicit conversation occurring. You receive a TrackBack ping from me because I read your post and had something to say about it on my own weblog.
While I do agree with the fact that Individual pings are great, and use them frequently, there’s something to be said for the automatic options. Mainly the option to auto-ping the blog itself like I have enabled here. I really like to know when people are talking about my site in general, not just about a single post. That’s why I have auto-discovery enabled and trackback data on my index page, so if someone types a post with http://kadyellebee.com/ in it, it will know to auto-ping me. (hint, you can do this, too - I have a tutorial for it from a while back). So I don’t think it always has to be a specific effort for me to trackback someone; if I trackback something, I have good reason. In fact, that’s why I list the trackbacks that I send in my Individual archives (codes for that option) - I want people to be able to see the other things that I’m talking about if I ping somewhere else. Which reminds me that at some point, I hope its configured so that I can show an actual link to the post I’m talking about instead of just the ping URL.
I’m not sure that the feedback that I’m giving on this post is fully thought through. I started writing this post, and then the Kingdom Hearts site I was on crashed Mozilla. Oops. So I think I’m missing something in my logic here. But I did want to talk about it, and I may add more to this later 
Comments
Just a guess... but could the six apart have to do with seven degrees of separation? I always thought that was a fun concept... that you are connected to every person in the world by seven degrees (I know you, you know x, x knows y, etc)
Posted by: Katie | December 12, 2002 08:06 AM
Just a guess... but could the six apart have to do with seven degrees of separation? I always thought that was a fun concept... that you are connected to every person in the world by seven degrees (I know you, you know x, x knows y, etc)
Posted by: Katie | December 12, 2002 08:07 AM
I always thought it was six degrees of separation, which would very clearly explain the naming concept. But seven? Ran it into GoogleFight to check:
http://www.googlefight.com/cgi-bin/compare.pl?q1=%22six+degrees+of+separation%22&q2=%22seven+degrees+of+separation%22&B1=Make+a+fight%21&compare=1&langue=us
Yep, six.
Posted by: john | December 12, 2002 10:46 AM
There’s a pretty cutesy meaning behind the name—and I’m always slightly embarrassed to explain it: Agewise, Ben and I are six days apart.
Posted by: Mena | December 12, 2002 11:05 AM
I actually wrote some PHP on my blog that gets more info about Trackbacks that I’ve sent. Unfortunately, it only works with other blogs on milbertus.com since I need to be able to log in to the MySQL database to pull down the info that I need. It’s definitely better than nothing, though.
And for the record, you gave me the idea to do that, when I saw that you listed Outgoing Pings on your individual entries. Once I saw that there wasn’t much that you could do with them, I wanted to see if there was anything that I could add to it, at least in part. Thanks for inspiring me.
Posted by: milbertus | December 12, 2002 05:31 PM
Six DAYS Apart? LOL!
Posted by: john | December 13, 2002 06:51 AM