Cool. I just got my first piece of trackback spam posted to this new blog. I am so happy that at least now spammers have taken note of my site and found it worthy to deface with their advertisements.
I talked a little bit about trackbacks a while ago. The thing that really surprises me is that the system was designed to be so easily fooled. Shouldn't, at a minimum, my site try to validate that trackback in question actually does link back to my post before allowing the entry on the page?
Scoble links (indirectly) to a study that shows that 92% of "influencers" have heard of RSS and that 87% use RSS readers.
*Yawn* I bet a high percentage also watch televesion, read books, eat at McDonald's, drive a car or any number of other things. This doesn't really seem to prove anything.
Although I find it interesting that 8% of influential people in the field haven't heard of the technology driving it. That's the more surprising number.
I notice that Jana was nice enough to subscribe to my blog, although for the life of me I can't see why. I hope that she isn't to horrified at my long, inchoherent rants about silly technical things.
I'll try to come up with a few posts every now and then that are more friendly to a graphic designer audience. Maybe I could talk about CSS or something?
It's 5am and I was having trouble staying asleep. So what would any normal person do? Why run to the computer and see if anyone in the blogosphere is talking about me. Like some pushy salesman, I finally configured Movable Type to notify the world--specifically Technorati, Weblogs.com, and Movable Type--every time a post an entry.
I've been focusing on Technorati these past few days, but decided to see what was happening on other services. Jeremy Zawodny now has links to both Technorati and Bloglines searches. This time, I clicked on the Bloglines link.
The Bloglines search is still a bit slow, but when the results show up, my post is listed in the second spot. I click through on the preview link. It's strange to see my words all formatted and blog like on another server, but I like the clean look.
My eyes are drawn to the top of the page, which announces that four people have subscribed to my blog. Clicking through I notice that only three people are willing to admit publicly to this. I did confirm with Ben over instant messaging last night that he has also been reading my blog, although I don't know whether he is the mysterious fourth subscriber or if I have a fifth reader.
This is really starting to freak me out a bit. I was feeling a bit discouraged yesterday wondering if all of my writing was being wasted with no one reading it. Still, I'm not sure I feel better knowing that there are people who do.
Now I'm scanning through my previous posts, trying to gauge whether there is at all anything in them that would be interesting to someone other than myself. I'm really not sure.
My experiment to see if Technorati can be a viable alternative to trackback, now that Jeremy Zawodny has declared that trackbacks are dead, seems to have been a failure.
Not having written any blog posts for nine months means I haven't had the opportunity to observe how Technorati handles my blog. It was fun, then, sending out ping to the service. I was pleasantly surprised to see my post show up in the list of entries referencing Jeremy's post. However, I wonder why the entry featured only the two words within the anchor tag and didn't provide any additional context. Really, "had enough" is hardly interesting enough for anyone to clickthrough. The entry didn't even have a real title for my post.
The Technorati link search also seems to behave strangely. For one thing, it is very slow. I think the nonresponsiveness of the site is fairly well acknowledged, but I'm willing to forgive a little performance problem--running a successful site is hard. But inconsistent results are more troubling.
I just ran a search for pages linking to Jeremy's post. The results seem to be switching back and forth between "26 sites, 3 links in the last 2 days" and "31 sites, 18 links in the last 1 day". This is hardly inspiring my confidence in services like Technorati providing an accurate and timely view of events unfolding in the blogosphere.
I wonder whether a centralized service like Technorati is even the appropriate solution for this particular problem. While there may debates over the number of "real" blogs, the number is clearly increasing rapidly. Assuming that a central store can efficiently handle all of this growing data seems silly.
Isn't the right solution to a distributed problem like this to find a way for the individual sites to keep track of which other sites are linking to them, using some type of notification system. Maybe something like, oh, well, a trackback?
The current trackback system may well be flawed, but that doesn't mean the idea is wrong. It may be unrealistic to expect Technorati to collect and index hundreds of thousands or even millions of posts each day. It is perfectly realistic, however, to imagine Jeremy maintaining a list of a few dozen sites linking to the one or two or three entries that he writes each day.
Yahoo blogger Jeremy Zawodny has had enough with trackbacks and is getting ready to disable them on his blog. They aren't disabled yet, so I thought I might have to take advantage of the time to send my own trackback before I lose the ability forever. But that seemed a little childish, even for my own developmentally challenged social skills.
Instead, how about this as a little experiment:
Hi, Jeremy. I'm a long time reader, first time linker. I just wanted to know how likely it would be for you, or any of your readers, to discover what I thought about your post if I don't use trackbacks. Will PubSub or Technorati really be able to find this message and add it to the distributed conversation?
It looks like 618 people on 43 Things want to "Be a better blogger". I was one of the early people to adopt this goal and, well, I have been less than successful at following though.
From reading through the entries posted there, the best piece of advice seems to be to try to write something every day. Seems like easy enough advice. I suddenly feel ready to recommit and rededicate myself to blogging.
Unfortunately, this is my second post on this new blog and already I have fallen off track. I hope this is just a temprorary setback and not the beginning of another six months before I write my next post.
