My initial reaction to TrackBack when I first heard about it was: Huh? I didn't get quite get it. I didn't see the real use of it. But this weekend something clicked. Comments work fine for some situations. Someone posts something to their blog and you want to say something quick about it. But what happens if you've got a lot to say on the subject, or it ends up pushing you on a bit of a tangent. In my case it is times like that when I want to make a post to my own blog. The thing is, how do I tie that in to the page that inspired me?

In the past I had just put in a comment about the post and referencing the post I made. But there's something about TrackBack i find more interesting. It helps promote traffic to places that might not ordinarily get it. For instance, I get a reasonable amount of traffic on this site, and I'm not necessarily looking for more. At the same time, when I post thoughts on someone else's blog it is nice to know that there is a some way to connect those two posts and share that with people who read the original.

Here's an example. I posted some thoughts about Safari and Opera the other day and did a TrackBack over to a post on Surfin Safari. Now, normally that post would have been made, and the people who read my blog would have read it. Dave Hyatt, the author of Surfin Safari, might have noticed in his referer logs that I had referenced his post. Other people probably wouldn't have stumbled across it. This time with TrackBack, people have been hitting that page continuously. While nobody has commented, the connection between the two posts is more solid. It would be cool for someone to write up a site that tracks this kinda stuff and graph out the connections between posts.

So I think I give Trackback a thumbs up for now. I'd like to see Radio equipped to handle sending out pings. Maybe I'll give it a try myself and see if I can figure out how to make that work.