I hope Byrne Reese and the others at Six Apart can lift TrackBack up a level via Submitting TrackBack as an Internet Standard. Ever since November, 2004, CNET News.com has supported TrackBack. Heck, we even put out a press release about it 13 months ago.
Results are mixed. A few gems, but lots of spam (most of which we catch, fortunately). And lots of links to News.com which are not captured/recorded by our systems, probably because folks don’t know to send the ping? I use a Technorati watchlist (feed URL / web URL) as an external monitor for the flood of links actually made to CNET News.com, and TrackBack (Pingback supported, too) isn’t seeing that much usage.
Good luck, Byrne. And send those pings when you link to CNET News.com!
4 responses so far ↓
1 Matt // Feb 22, 2006 at 11:02 am
About what percentage of valid incoming pings are pingbacks or trackbacks?
2 Anil // Feb 22, 2006 at 7:05 pm
It’s interesting, a few folks noted CNET’s early support for TrackBack after PRWeb announced today that they’re enabling TrackBacks for press releases. The basic challenge is that autodiscovery isn’t enabled by default for a lot of users, but that may well change over time.
3 John Roberts // Feb 22, 2006 at 7:36 pm
I’ll check on the percentages. I don’t think we’ve broken it down by which are pingbacks and which are trackbacks… more by what is spam and what’s not. Ballpark is 80+% spam.
4 Emmanuel // Feb 23, 2006 at 1:38 am
Same results for ZDNet France. 90% are spam based. The good thing : the spam filter is very efficient (we use the same than News.com) and the value of the 10% trackbacks is high.
The bad : trackbacks are not really user friendly for common people or non-geek audience. The best we can expect from trackback is to turn it as an automatic feature used by a large number of CMS tools. Any quote and link should be interpreted as a trackback (I know, that could turn to a nightmare for IS admin).
By the way I noticed the same problem with technorati: very popular service supported by a strong buzz around tech community but not really used day by day outside the power users family …
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