I was going to post a question on my blog here along the lines of: is anyone actually using TrackBack enjoyably?

Then, I thought I should put some more effort into it myself. At this very moment, I am both working on cleaning up the trackback page for this blog and writing some kind of JavaScript helper for me to trackback ping other sites that I link to.

I just saw that Dave Winer posted a link and "right on" comment to a critical review of trackback on the Daring Fireball blog, called Take Your TrackBacks and Dangle.

So, I am going to try to use trackBack more, but my general sense is that it ain't quite right. The Daring Fireball review spells it all out.

That being said, I do find things about trackback attractive, and in fact, one major feature of iCites is an automated trackback-like interaction. The idea is that reciprical cross-references, should they be desired, should be automated and should itself function as a new medium of useful information.

So, functionally, I just mean more powerful links with more metadata. These happen at the iCite application level: this isn't about trying to implement XLink (though maybe iCites will be able to express their links as XLinks if someone wants them that way). iCites just make sure other iCites know when they link to each other.

The other issue brought up in the Daring Fireball review is that static websites and many blogs do not support trackback. This will also be an issue with iCites, though part of the idea with iCites is that they can be add-ons to websites and blogs, and, as such, they don't have to live on the same server as your site or blog.

That being said, anything that isn't totally "built-in" to website or blog software is going to be generally less adopted unless it becomes its own thing (I mean, blogs editing tools weren't built-in to website editing tools, but blogs became its own thing in this sense). I hope the iCite net will become its own thing in this sense too.

If all the blog tools supported trackback, that would be good and help adoption. But, I don't think trackback is clean and smooth and interesting enough to really compete against the features of blog comments, referer logs, Technorati and Google.

I do imagine the iCite net and iCites being clean and smooth and interesting enough to have some value along side those other services. This is because I see the iCite net as functioning (should it succeed) as a pervasive service rather than as an application feature like trackback. I think trackback is too application specific (i.e., too specific to blog posts, even more than being specific to just Moveable Type).