This afternoon, CNET News.com introduced public TrackBack and Pingback support. I’m thrilled the team got this feature live, and I look forward to seeing how readers and the larger web community respond. I don’t know of any other major non-blog site that has adopted these emerging standards. Of course, it’s hard to be first at anything… and even harder to prove it. We’re building on what others have done and applying it where it’s useful. That should be enough, right? So, I’m just satisfied that the feature is live and the thirteen readers and counting who pinged the TrackBack/Pingback introduction page were complimentary… although I can’t read the Japanese entry, so I’m hoping for the best.
Technically, TrackBack is a pain to grok. I spent lots of time talking it through with some really smart folks at work, and what seems simple (tell another site in a machine-readable way that you linked to them) requires more effort than I would have thought. Content management systems and blog publishing tools may be converging, but some of the assumptions of one world are not yet to be taken for granted in the other. I’m expecting that some of the abuse counter-measures which have spread through the blogging world will need to be adopted by CNET News.com. Note: there are some in place now, of course. There may be moments of concern. But you can’t really learn until you take the live plunge… and the water feels pretty good so far.
Irony is being unable to successfully send a ping from my own blog to the feature I helped launch. Radio just isn’t that clean on this stuff. Maybe this time it will work?