Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

I twittered this morning

Bloggers who think posts which are relevant/warrant ‘trackbacks’ to my blog, should quote the stuff they find interesting…

Within a short space of time, I received 6 emails and DMs (including two from journalists) asking if I was referring to them. To ensure I don’t insult anyone or give the wrong impression, I’ve decided to write a slightly longer explanation here, as Twitter’s restricted 140 characters does little to help right now.

Before I continue, I’d like to explain what Trackbacks are and how to use them, as they’re not fully understood by all bloggers and they’re almost always underutilized. Even the most seasoned bloggers don’t make them accessible so others can reference their work easily.

What is a Trackback?

Why reinvent the Wheel?! Wikipedia has a great description

A Trackback is one of three types of Linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking, and so referring, to their articles. Some weblog software programs, such as Wordpress, Movable Type, Typo and Community Server, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published. The term is used colloquially for any kind of Linkback.

NB. I’ve not only quoted the origin of my source, I’ve also provided a Linkback to the Wikipedia page. Italics are mine.

How to use Trackbacks

It’s simple. Copy the Trackback URL from the blog to which you are going to reference and paste it into the Trackback field provided on the administration page where you’re writing your post. If you can’t find a URL dedicated to Trackbacks you should use the URL for the post. The rest happens automatically. The author of the post to which you refer, will receive an email notification and their blog post will be updated with a link to your post - assuming they’ve enabled that feature of course.

Trackbacks normally appear within comments - click here to see what they look like on this blog. Displaying Trackbacks provides commentators a platform from which to promote their opinion on their own blog. I’m a fan of people writing their own post which has been inspired by another blogger - but only when they provide an opinion, rather than doing a copy ‘n paste.

Some reasons why you might want to write your own post instead of leaving a comment:

1. Your comment is, in your opinion, too long. (I don’t mind long comments - the comments on one of my posts last year fetched over 17,000 in word count)
2. You feel so strongly about something that you wish to solicit opinion from the readers of your own blog
3. You don’t feel comfortable or like leaving comments

It’s standard practice to provide a Linkback to the post from which you were inspired to write an opinion piece. So make sure you always link to your source.

How to implement Trackbacks on your blog

If you have a blog, my advice is to ensure the Trackback URL is the same as the post URL. This will enable others to copy and paste the URL in the address bar instead of having to go searching for the Trackback link. TechCrunch changed it’s blog to include this obvious feature. Read Write Web hasn’t - Look at this post http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/amazon_buys_shelfari.php - you must scroll down the page to search and find the Trackback, which is http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/4747. If they were the same URL you wouldn’t have to go searching and I wouldn’t have just confused you. It’s blogs like this that make Tracbacks more confusing than they ought to be.

When to use Trackbacks to this blog

I appreciate it when people include a Trackback to my blog - it means they rate my opinion on a particular topic and would therefore like me to read their article and potentially post a comment. In fact, I’m flattered - please don’t stop. You just have to look at my tag cloud on the left of this blog to see what’s relevant. Although, you can check out the BIMA and Segala blogs to see what else I write about.

However, some people write posts which are not relevant to me and wish to simply get my attention for some reason. Remember, I get email notifications each time someone links to my blog. If there’s absolutely no relevance I’m going to view it as spam and never return to that blog. Stop doing it. Please.