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Watching time, the only true currency // A journal from John B. Roberts

Day: December 11, 2004

  • Making linking more enjoyable

    Randy Charles Morin on The RSS Blog notes: “I’ve noticed that I enjoy linking more to people w/ trackbacks enabled than those who do not have trackbacks enabled.” (We’ll see if my TrackBack link to Randy’s post succeeds.) That was certainly a part of supportingTrackBack on CNET News.com. Since posting about the public introduction, I’ve monitored the links and found lots of interesting places around the web where people are commenting on news stories. Honestly, I’d like to see even more, because I still can manually find many more links to News.com stories on other sites that are not recorded automatically.

    I think it takes more public evangelism to get

    • those whose systems will send a trackback/pingback to remember that News.com accepts them, and displays them
    • those whose systems don’t yet send a trackback/pingback to add that capability

    CNET News.com itself falls in the latter category, for now, so I’m not throwing stones, but I do hope to help the bootstrapping process along. On Friday, News.com started automatically sending notice to Pingomatic.com when there is new content on the site, and letting those redistributed pings pass on the word. I have no idea what effect that will have, but I don’t think it can hurt.

  • Is everything content?

    MacMerc, a site I loosely follow via their feed, pointed me to the Content Management Comparison Tool at CMS Matrix. And then I see Richard point to a comparison of hosted blogging platforms. Content management (what a phrase) in the air.

    The hard part remains creation, regardless of the tool or platform. But it’s true that better tools give fewer excuses for avoiding the harder work of creation.