Ponder this for a second:


That was a challenge issued by Berkely Assistant Dean, Adjunct Professor, and Director of the New Media Program, Paul Grabowicz at last week's Inman Connect conference during a presentation on "Citizen Journalism: A New Press with a New Mission." Would you notice?

Along this same line, I took a similar step last week on Technology Evangelist: I turned of Trackbacks and nobody noticed. Cool. This saves me the time I spent purging trackback spam. The noise to signal ratio was running around 600:1. Most of that was caught by our spam filters and the rest moderated, but that still takes time and resources that could be spent on other things.

Do trackbacks add value to blogs? If there were used the way there were likely intended to be used - letting people know you've written about their post on your own site - there likely would be. But they fail when:

1. People write about - but contribute little new knowledge to - posts on other sites just for trackback's sake.

2. Spammers pound blogs with trackback pings to build links to their sites.

A better way to solve the trackback issue would be using a 3rd party site to track who's linked to a given site or post. And that site exists today: Technorati. For example, here is Technorati's report of blog posts linking to a post I wrote the other day about Techorati. Technorati handles the spam filtering issue for everyone.

So, should I add a link to Technorati's backlink report for each post, or does THAT even matter?