[drewprops]

I have a really foggy grasp of pinging and trackbacks, why I should (or shouldn't) use them and what is considered proper behavior. Could you guys give me some real world examples of how to do this and tell me why it's good, bad or wasted effort.
Seems kind of pointless...

[Majost]

Agreed. And a total waste of space on Blogs. Have you ever tried to load a page that had *thousands* of ping/trackbacks? It takes for flippin' ever. And really yields no decent information.

Yes, I can (kinda, maybe, sorta) see how they would be helpful for the blog author... but why must they so often obscure the comments/content of blogs?

And I've never really seemed to understand *how* they happened. Is that just part of the "magic" of Blogger software?

[Brad]

As always, John Gruber is on the ball. Just a couple days ago, he mentioned how trackbacks are turning to crap, as he'd discussed would happen three years ago.

"Matt Mullenweg reports that 98 percent of TrackBacks filtered through Akismet are spam. I got a ton of flak when I published “Take Your TrackBacks and Dangle” three years ago, but today, I think there are more people who see TrackBack as a hindrance than a help."

[torifile]

Yeah, pings and trackbacks make no sense to me, either. On my site (dbt-u.com) I'll often refer to an earlier blog entry as a link in a future one and it shows up as a trackback in the earlier one's comments. I don't understand it or their utility. (and I have no idea how it really works.)

[Brad]

Well, they are "useful" in the sense that you can see who found your article useful.

ie. Trackbacks and pings make your Internet dick bigger.

[thuh Freak]

Originally Posted by Brad ie. Trackbacks and pings make your Internet dick bigger.

[drewprops]

So, if Tori made a post about his bowling team and instead of posting a comment about his article in the comments field of his article I decided to write an article of my own about psychiatric bowlers, I could set my article to ping his article? Does that make my article show up immediately in his article's comments? I guess that's the thing I don't understand about pings. It's easy to see why comment spam could get bad in a hurry.

[Brad]

Yup. That's pretty much what it does. It makes a part of your article appear with a link in the trackbacks/comments section under his article.

[Majost]

Originally Posted by Brad Yup. That's pretty much what it does. It makes a part of your article appear with a link in the trackbacks/comments section under his article.

That rarely happens. Most blogs only end up putting: [...]article name[...]