I’ve noticed lately that some bloggers — including me — are reluctant to leave trackbacks when they write about the posts of other bloggers. And I’ve been trying to figure out why that might be the case.
Here is how Movable Type, which created the mechanism, explains trackbacks:
[Person A has written a post on his own weblog that comments on a post in Person B’s weblog.]
That sounds simple enough, but it seems to me that in practice, trackbacks say much more than that.
I have, at different times, thought about trackbacks in two very different ways:
When I first started blogging, I felt the latter more than the former: leaving a trackback felt like a cry for attention: look at me! look at my blog! This was true especially for TypePad blogs, which privilege trackbacks above reader comments by placing them just below the post itself.
The longer I blog, however, the more convinced I’ve become that the first interpretation is usually more correct: most bloggers like to see people trackback to their posts. Trackbacks show that people are actually reading the blog, and help create the inter-site conversations that define blogging as the intertextual medium that it is.
And if a blogger doesn’t like trackbacks, he or she can easily disable them.
I have an untested hypothesis that conservative bloggers leave trackbacks on like-minded sites more frequently than than liberal bloggers do. My entirely biased supposition is that this is due to the top-down message structure that Chris Bowers described so well in Aristocratic Right Wing Blogosphere Stagnating. If this is true (and it may not be, since, as Chris points out, most of the top conservative blogs allow neither comments nor trackbacks), is that because wingnuts are shameless message bots, mindlessly repeating party spin, or because liberals are digital wallflowers, too embarrassed to draw attention to their own words?
Where do you stand on this issue? Do you trackback to the posts you write about? Why or why not?
8 Comments on "The Politics of Trackbacks"
Chris:
As you know, I have some funny feelings about this issue myself. I do like getting trackbacks, even the negative ones, because it feels as if the post has provided someone with a little fodder. On the other hand, I usually don’t send out trackbacks for the very reason you listed unless I feel like the post really adds something to the original.
When somebody sends a trackback to a little site like mine, they probably aren’t expecting much return traffic, which is good because they won’t get it. That’s usually part of the distinction for me, I’ll trackback small sites as a show of support for other little guys, much more readily than I will sites with a lot of traffic, as I’m not all that interested in traffic. I think a lot of us are digital wallflowers to one degree or another.
Sending trackbacks to WordPress sites can be particularly nerve wracking because the trackback sits in the middle of the comments and can break up a good comment thread in weird ways.
jane:
Matt,
I’m embarrassed to say I don’t use them because I don’t know what they are (or didn’t until you explained it) and don’t know how to set them in blogger. Now that you have taught me about them I’ll look into figuring it out. If you have any cheat sheet suggestions, it might be helpful if you posted them. Blogger is easy to use as far as setting up a blog and I know enough HTML to change my template manually but some of the niceties escape me. Hopefully I’m not to only uneducated blogger out there, so others may find the info useful as well.
howard:
I have my WP installation set up with default settings, which send trackbacks automatically to anything I link to that’s compatible with the WP mechanism. This seems appropriate to me most of the time, though sometimes I include a marginal link to someone else’s post (without much substantive comment of my own) and am later surprised to find my trackback in their comments.
But seeing how it’s used by most folks, I don’t really feel that bad about it. Like you said, people who don’t want trackbacks coming up can disable (or moderate) them in most feed back platforms
yoko:
My philosophy is simple: if I quote from another site, and if the site allows for trackbacks, I will send a trackback to the site. It’s rare that I will merely quote a site, either directly or indirectly, without adding my own commentary, and usually my commentary is not merely a concurring statement.
On the flip side, I don’t receive many trackbacks to my site, but those that I have received have been insightful, and a couple have been from sites I hadn’t heard of previously. It’s a nice way of discovering that I have readers who aren’t just my IRL friends.
acm:
I don’t use trackbacks for a combination of the attention-begging and technical-cluelessness reasons. If somebody wants to see who’s linking to them, they can check their referer logs or do a Technorati search. Plus, a lot of times I either link to the linked content (and give a nod to the referer) or am linking to a post at a huge site that doesn’t need my encouragement (like kos).
If I want to comment on a post, I try to do that at the blog. If that were impossible and I really wanted to engage the author in a dialogue, then a trackback might fit the bill. but so might an email. whatever.
another penny for the pond,
acm
mac:
I’m pro-trackback. I try to ping whenever possible, although I admit that I forget half the time. Of course, then there’s the issue of my trackback sender acting funky half the time. I should really just use a standalone pinger and be done with it.
Mark:
I’ve tried using trackback links as a hyperlink, thinking that’s the way it’s done. But since my blog is on MSN Spaces (which is, of course, owned and operated by the anti-christ) I have only been able to get them to work every so often, and not nearly as much as I’d like.
It’s either because: 1.) I’m getting what I’m paying for; 2.) I’m just an idiot who’s doing it the wrong way; 3.) both 1 and 2.
I’d like to use them just so the owners of the posts to which I reference know that I’m doing it.
theroxylandr:
I’m always trying to trackback because the traffic to my website is miserable :-) Click it, at least somebody! :-))) http://theroxylandr.wordpress.com/
Comments