I hope Byrne Reese and the others at Six Apart can lift TrackBack up a level via Submitting TrackBack as an Internet Standard. Ever since November, 2004, CNET News.com has supported TrackBack. Heck, we even put out a press release about it 13 months ago.
Results are mixed. A few gems, but lots of spam (most of which we catch, fortunately). And lots of links to News.com which are not captured/recorded by our systems, probably because folks don’t know to send the ping? I use a Technorati watchlist (feed URL / web URL) as an external monitor for the flood of links actually made to CNET News.com, and TrackBack (Pingback supported, too) isn’t seeing that much usage.
Good luck, Byrne. And send those pings when you link to CNET News.com!