Curiouser and Curiouser!

Curiouser and Curiouser! on trackback http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic trackback Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb TrackBack for Radio Sun, 30 Jun 2002 19:54:33 +0100 I'm really excited by the <A href="http://www.movabletype.org/docs/mtmanual_trackback.html">TrackBack</A> feature that has been implemented for MovableType.  I'd really love to see something similar for Radio. My first thoughts were to implement an RCS extension that uses XML-RPC calls.  The idea is that whenever you post to your blog, an upstream callback extracts the links from the text and sends them to the RCS server.  RCS would then keep a per-site record of all such pings.  Another XML-RPC call would allow Radio to get information about all pings to any pages relating to your site.  Working in the same ways as referrer information does now. The one major disadvantage I see to this approach is that it isn't how MT's system works.   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000070.html TrackBack for Radio Sat, 06 Jul 2002 00:19:26 +0100 <A href="http://davidwatson.org:8086/archives/000386.html">David Watson</A> has Radio talking to Movable Type's TrackBack feature. [<A href="http://www.scripting.com/">Scripting News</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Cool.  I'll be looking to play with this ASAP.  </BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000099.html KMpings & Trackback Tue, 09 Jul 2002 20:12:09 +0100 <A href="http://www.highcontext.com/blarchive/2002_07_09.html">The KMpings Experiment</A>. I created a little blog called <A href="http://www.highcontext.com/kmpings/">KMpings</A> that allows any blogger writing about knowledge management to ping their post to a tracking page (if their software supports it). Think of it as a themed <A href="http://www.weblogs.com">www.weblogs.com</A> for the knowledge management community. I wanted to try out this experiment since I think the <A href="http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/">TrackBack function created by Movable Type</A> has a lot of potential for aggregating blog posts within communities of practice on the web or an intranet. Please post any feed back you have to this message or shoot me an <A href="mailto:david@highcontext.com">e-mail</A>. [<A href="http://www.highcontext.com/">High Context</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » I really want TrackBack for Radio. And KMpings sounds like a great idea.</BLOCKQUOTE>   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000131.html Trackback for Radio inches closer Wed, 10 Jul 2002 22:08:05 +0100 <A href="http://www.highcontext.com/blarchive/2002_07_10.html">Radio TB Ping Development</A>. <A href="http://home.netcom.com/~luskr/weblog/radio/categories/kLogs/2002/07/10.html">Ron Lusk is working on a script for setting up TB pings in Radio:</A> <BLOCKQUOTE> I've posted a message to the <A href="http://radio.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$16648?mode=topic&y=2002&m=7&d=10">Radio Userland discussion group</A> asking where to hook into the system so I can ping KMPings once for each entry. </BLOCKQUOTE> [<A href="http://www.highcontext.com/">High Context</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Fantastic news.</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000164.html Why TrackBack? Wed, 10 Jul 2002 22:27:07 +0100 <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0109150/2002/07/09.html#a227">More on TrackBack for KM</A>. If Gammel and Mower both think there is something useful in TrackBack who am I to argue? I don't undersand it, but I'm open minded about it. [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0109150/">Blunt Force Trauma</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » I didn't get it at first either, and nor has everyone I've mentioned it to. What makes TrackBack so important is, I think, the following: Imagine that I read someone like Jon Udell (which I do) and I find an item of his particularly noteworthy or relevant to me.  I post it from my news page and add some editorial content of my own. But if, like me, you are a relatively new blogger then maybe very few people read my item and nobody bothers to click through to Jon's original.   My item never appears in his list of referrers. This means Jon, likely, will not know that it exists.  We could imagine further that Jon would have liked to know what comments I made but he  never gets the opportunity. TrackBack addresses this problem.  It allows me as the author of an item to "ping" the original during the act of publishing.  This ping does not require someone to read my item and then click through to his.  Simply by publishing he is notified that someone has referenced him. I think this is a very powerful idea and will help to get new bloggers into the space.  For those with interesting things to say the time to migrate from the fringe to the centre will be drastically reduced. Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!  </BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000166.html Blogging books & Trackback Mon, 15 Jul 2002 09:58:46 +0100 <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0108194/2002/07/15.html#a118">Oh stop already.</A>. I keep reading entries discussing the idea "how silly it is that there are books coming out about blogging." Look, there's a simple fact that seems to elude most of the Blogerati, if I may coin a term. Most people (something that has no statistically relevant deviation from EVERYONE) have NO idea that blogs exist. The books about blogging need to be there. We're in a pretty self-congradulatory medium here. Hell, I'd even go so far as to say that an inaccurate book is better than no book. <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » I think this is a key point.  When I step back and think about it I've had a lot of conversations recently where the subject of blogging came up because people asked me about what I was doing.  There then followed a conversation where I try to get across what it's all about.  In desparation I usually end up with some sort of half-baked: "It's like a web diary" explanation.  This misses so much of value but there you go.  These are people who know what the Internet, use wordprocessors and email, maybe even write web pages. So the value of the books, even the bad ones, is as <A href="http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/2002/07/14.html#a2648">Jenny</A> points out: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> "Now I find myself in the same situation with blogs. I plan to implement them for every service area at <A href="http://www.sls.lib.il.us/" target=_blank>SLS</A> and on a personal level for staff internally and yet, I'd be surprised if even 10% of our staff understand what they are. I covered blogs at our SLS Tech Summit in March, but it was still too confusing and irrelevant for most of the librarians that attended that session. Next time, I'll be able to hold up these books, and they'll take me more seriously. Sorry, but that's how most of the world still works. They'll purchase them for their libraries, too, which means the concept of blogs will officially be cataloged and indexed in our collective memory (not just the memory of those of us who live online)."</BLOCKQUOTE> People are going to read these books.  Lots of 'em.  I hope Blogger.com have a good relationship with their server suppliers!</BLOCKQUOTE> Blogging is currently a one-way medium. Best you can do is have 2 (ok, "N") people subscribing to each other's monologues. But with TrackBack you close the loop and notify your conversation partner that it's now her/his turn. Now you can TRULY have interchange. Something that's only hackishly possible at the moment. (Check the userland discussions for the number of times people ask for "comment notifications".) <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » I agree.  I think TrackBack is a very important technology.  I'm reaching for a metaphor but can't find a good one. But effectively it's the difference between a broadcast system and a network.  Blogs alone are too much like public broadcasting.  You send and if you're lucky you get back letters and phone calls.  With TrackBack people can be wired in, feedback loops will be established, communities will grow, it'll all come alive.  </BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000197.html Trackback and topic maps Mon, 15 Jul 2002 22:18:28 +0100 <A href="http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/2002/07/15.html#a2659">Truly Closing The Loop With Trackback</A>. <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> "Blogging is currently a one-way medium. Best you can do is have 2 (ok, 'N') people subscribing to each other's monologues. But with <A href="http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/">TrackBack</A> you close the loop and notify your conversation partner that it's now her/his turn. Now you can TRULY have interchange. Something that's only hackishly possible at the moment. (Check the userland discussions for the number of times people ask for 'comment notifications'.)" [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0108194/2002/07/15.html#a118">The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty</A>] "I agree.  I think TrackBack is a very important technology.  I'm reaching for a metaphor but can't find a good one.  But effectively it's the difference between a broadcast system and a network.  Blogs alone are too much like public broadcasting.  You send and if you're lucky you get back letters and phone calls.  With TrackBack people can be wired in, feedback loops will be established, communities will grow, it'll all come alive." [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/">Curiouser and curiouser!</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> TrackBack is a fantastic idea, because I could never manually find all of the posts that might point to mine. So it goes out and harvests them for me, but the problem becomes time to review them. Depending on how popular your posts are, it might be useful to Trackback notifications into your news aggregator. Of course, this could pretty overwhelming for folks like <A href="http://www.scripting.com/">Dave</A> and <A href="http://doc.weblogs.com/">Doc</A> but then again, it might save them the type of finding the cites manually. And could you build a master database of these things and organize them by category? Kind of make a Social Sciences Citation Index for your site? Something like that would be extremely useful within the Illinois libraries blogosphere I want to implement. [<A href="http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/">The Shifted Librarian</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » The citation index is an interesting idea.  Combining TrackBack with topic maps would enable some interesting analysis of who was citing you.  This could make Trackback both scalable and more usable.    </BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000204.html A perfect example of why TrackBack is so vital Tue, 06 Aug 2002 23:01:19 +0100 Damn.  If I'd had TrackBack I would have seen this: <A href="http://www.emergic.org/archives/2002/05/30/index.html#blogging_communities">http://www.emergic.org/archives/2002/05/30/index.html#blogging_communities</A> where Rajesh describes BlogStreet and how it relates to the Blog Connector (and later BlogPlex) ideas I have been musing about.  Pity it's taken me this long to pick it up.   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000261.html Let's see what's on the slab... Thu, 08 Aug 2002 20:52:14 +0100 Well in the last couple of days I have been working hard on the liveTopics 1.0 release.  It's so close I can almost feel it.  We're testing and hopefully will have the kinks worked out in the next couple of days then I can finally get this sucka out the door. Also I'm really besotted with TrackBack but haven't seen it work the way I would like yet.  So I've rolled a TrackBack server in Frontier that comes with a Radio client.  The two communicate with a simple XML-RPC interface that would allow any klogging system to join in. At the moment the Radio client automatically harvests each posting for links (when you submit it) and automagically pings each one.  The ping contains the permalink for the post, the Url of your weblog, the title of the post, your name & email address.  But you can drop most of this information you don't want to pass it.  I guess some people will also want fine-grained control over what they ping.  That shouldn't be too hard. Along with this are some macros to show your TrackBack information against each item. At the moment the server is hosted on my laptop which isn't ideal but is good enough for testing.  The next job is to find a better host and then look at adding a simple federation mechanism.  That would allow lots of different people to provide TrackBack servers and share the results. More on this later. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000268.html More on TrackBack Fri, 09 Aug 2002 17:01:45 +0100 <A href="http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backissues/2002/08/09#whatAboutTrackback">What about TrackBack?</A>. While I was in the hospital in June, the Movable Type folks implemented a <A href="http://www.movabletype.org/docs/mtmanual_trackback.html">feature</A> <A href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=trackback">called</A> <A href="http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/">TrackBack</A>. I'm not exactly sure all that it can do, but here's at least part of the story. (I'm posting this so I can get corrected if I don't understand the feature. It occurs to me that this post could use the feature, heh.) Anyone, anywhere can send a message to any Movable Type server to associate a URL with a weblog post. That URL will be shown in the list of TrackBack links for the post. Further, based on an email from <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/2002/08/08.html#a251">Matt Mower</A>, for some reason that I don't understand, this can only work with Movable Type servers. I doubt this, because from all outward appearances it is using HTTP, which could be emulated by any program capable of doing HTTP. Matt thinks this feature should be implemented with XML-RPC. I'm not sure it'll take off no matter what it's implemented in. Here's the problem. By design it seems to assume that everyone plays fair. But eventually we all attract a relatively small number of people who would mark up every post with trash talk, if given the chance to. It's a predictable process. That's why I don't have a discussion group here (I used to), or a comments feature. It's why MSNBC is moving to weblogs over discussion software. It's basically why weblogs have a future for thoughtful discourse where mail-list-like collaboration tools are dead-ends. When I think about evolving weblogs, I try to avoid features that turn them into discussion groups. [<A href="http://www.scripting.com/">Scripting News</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » I think there has been a misunderstanding between Dave and I.  Maybe I misphrased something or it was misinterpreted.  Either way: I'm not suggesting that TrackBack can only be implemented in MT.  Just that, as it is implemented in MT it can only be served by MT and is most useful to MT users.  It doesn't suit me very much.   I also don't like the way you have to TrackBack enable things, use special URL's, have bookmarklets etc..  all that gets in the way to me. I envisage an open XML-RPC based system.  The TrackBack data should be available to & from any system and can track arbitrary URLs (no requirement to TrackBack enable anything). Also with the prototype Radio client all the work of pinging is done for you automatically.  As part of the publishing action Radio will figure out all the posts being referenced and ping them automatically.   That's how I want it to work, you might want it different which is why I say it's a prototype. As to the inherent design problem in trackback, well, I agree with the comments made.  From a certain viewpoint. However I see TrackBack not so much as a weblogging tool but as a k-logging tool.  It gives you the ability to know what someone else is contributing to projects you are working on and that could be vital.  As are discussion forums and all the other collaborative tools that help people do useful work. Will TrackBack be absused?  Sure.  But so can any technology.  If the abuse becomes a problem we can evolve strategies for addressing it.  For me this is a time for experimentation, it's too early to abandon a potentially useful idea like TrackBack because it has a potential for abuse. Example (and shooting from the hip) : Problem: "nusiance pings appearing on my TrackBack report."  This seems a lot like the problem of spam email to me.  Collaborative spam filtering looks set to deliver good results here, maybe it could do the same for TrackBack? [Disclaimer: TrackBack - I am a believer!]  </BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000285.html TrackBack questions Fri, 09 Aug 2002 20:16:32 +0100 I've had a couple of comments to the effect of "why implement TrackBack in XML-RPC when its perfectly fine in HTTP/XML?" I guess the answer is that Frontier & Radio make it so easy to implement XML-RPC clients & servers that it was the easiest way to glue together a TrackBack solution that worked the way I had in mind.  I guess there is no no reason why it couldn't also support the same method's as MT as well.  I have no technopolitcal axe to grind here. Something that really bothers me about TrackBack in MT though is the idea of enabling.  Have I got it right?  You have to enable a post for TrackBack before it can receive pings?  And the trackback url isn't the same as the link to the posting?  This seems clumsy to me.  Can someone explain what's going on with that?  Am I confused?   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000288.html Tracking back Fri, 09 Aug 2002 21:22:44 +0100 <A href="http://tig.nareau.com/2002/08/09.html#a203">Rahul</A> has the solution. Trackback and comments suffer from the same problem:  they aren't seemlessly integrated into the act of posting to a weblog.  Rahul's points out that a combination of RSS UIDs and blogrolls would seemlessly pull this off.  It would automatically thread the conversation back from your post.  This is a solution that doesn't detract from the weblogging experience.  All you need to do is post, and the rest is taken care of.  The requirements to participate would be that you need to have a weblog and be on someones blogroll (in someones neighborhood).  To screen out inconsiderate particpants, just put their blogs on your block list.   It gets really simple if this is an orgnizational setting: a list of all the people that run weblogs could provide a definitive blogroll, a one-stop-shop for all participants.  Nice. [<A href="http://jrobb.userland.com/">John Robb's Radio Weblog</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Rahul's idea is interesting, but it isn't TrackBack.  It still assumes a near-line level of connectivity between two blogs.  Maybe that's okay in some situations but I don't think it should be a requirement. As to seamless integration.  The Radio plugin I have devised provides that.  Any url you referencein a post gets pinged when that item is published.  No need to do a thing. Of course some people will want more control.  That's okay too...  </BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000290.html TrackBack and RSS Fri, 09 Aug 2002 21:58:47 +0100 Staying on theme... I see MT's TrackBack has the ability to generate some RSS output, but it doesn't actually look like RSS (as in, I don't think you could just subscribe your aggregator to it). Here's what I have in mind.  I want to know whenever someone pings any of my pages.  I register with the TrackBack server a pattern like <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/">http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/</A>* Whenever someone pings a page under that URL it gets added to a dynamic RSS feed with a URL generated for me.  I can subscribe to that feed in Radio and see all the trackback pings appear as news items. If I'm interested in who is writing about things Dave is saying I might add a pattern <A href="http://www.scripting.com/">http://www.scripting.com/</A>* and get his TrackBack results as well. Does MT's TrackBack do this already?  I couldn't really tell what it's RSS was doing... http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000294.html Getting referrers via RSS. Thu, 15 Aug 2002 10:52:12 +0100 <A href="http://radio.userland.com/directory/6742/community">Radio Wishlist - RCS Referers: RSS feed and rolling 24 hours.</A>. Can I get my referer lists as "RSS" feeds from the "Radio Community Server"? Can we make the list a rolling 24 or 25 hours instead of a clean sweep at midnight? [aka <A class=navigatorLink href="http://dijest.com/aka/categories/blueSkyRadio/">Blue Sky Radio</A>] [<A href="http://dijest.com/aka/">a klog apart</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Now this would be cool. TrackBack information should also appear this way (that's how I'm implementing it).    </BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000327.html Implementing trackback services Wed, 21 Aug 2002 10:52:04 +0100 Radio Tip: <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107233/categories/radioquestions/2002/08/20.html#a645">TrackBack tutorial</A> ~ <A href="http://www.whump.com/moreLikeThis/link/03015">Homebrew TrackBack Tutorial</A>  Got this from Whump.com. If you have TrackBack Envy (I do), here's your revenge: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> "It's easy for a non-Movable Type weblog to send <A title="Moveable Type Manual" href="http://www.movabletype.org/docs/mtmanual_trackback.html">trackback pings</A>. They use a <ACRONYM title="REpresentational State Transfer">REST</ACRONYM> interface: <CODE><A href="http://foo.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi?tb_id=ID&"><A href="http://foo.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi?tb_id=ID&">http://foo.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi?tb_id=ID&</A></A>;title=TITLE&url=URL</CODE> So you can write a bookmarklet that 'does the right thing' if you know the site's base URL. Trackback supports a few more parameters in the URL so you can send a summary of the reply, and the name of the site sending the ping." Over at Hit-or-Miss, they've been building <A title="Homebrew TrackBack Tutorial" href="http://www.hit-or-miss.org/projects/trackback/">their own Trackback server in PHP and MySQL</A>." </BLOCKQUOTE> [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107233/categories/radioquestions/">Dog News: radio questions</A>]  [From <A href="http://dws.us/weblog/categories/radiofaq/2002/08/20.html#a2187">DWS Radio FAQ</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Can someone explain to me what the tb_id part of the URL is? I'm still not convinced by MT TrackBack.  But I shall certainly try and support the current interface in my own TrackBack server implementation.</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000407.html Autotrackback Tue, 24 Sep 2002 18:46:51 +0100 <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0101679/2002/09/24.html#a843">Automating Trackback</A>. <A href="http://www.decafbad.com/news_archives/000292.phtml#000292">0xDECAFBAD</A>: I'd also like something that scans a blog entry I post for links, then investigate those links for Pingback/TrackBack availability - all to make the system even more automatic.  I'm game.  I've <A href="http://www.intertwingly.net/code/autoping.py">implemented it</A> in Python.  And written a Perl <A href="http://www.intertwingly.net/code/excerpt.pl">extracter or excerpts and pinger</A> which uses takes advantage of this.  I'll be testing it on this blog entry.  Once debugged, I'll connect this to my publishing process (though a simple cron job would do) and forget about it.  As Ben <A href="http://www.stupidfool.org/archives/2002/09/000211.shtml">says</A>, There is nothing inherent in TrackBack that makes it any less transparent to either of the users involved. The previous sentence is in there just so I can get two trackback entries out of this. <IMG alt=smiley src="http://static.userland.com/shortcuts/images/qbullets/sidesmiley.gif"> [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0101679/">Sam Ruby</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » This is exactly how the TrackBackish server I wrote worked.  The Radio piece automatically scanned the post for links and sent pings for each of them to the server. Why to a server?  Because that way everyone knows where to find them (and you can federate to spread the load). The idea was that you could obtain information about pings simply by specifying patterns to match, such as <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/">http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/</A>* to see who had pinged any page on your weblog.  You could also query for just about anything. I also had in mind a Wiki'ish syntax to add to the URL which the Radio code would strip out before publishing but would pass through to the backend server.  Something along the lines of <UL> <LI>*url - approve</LI> <LI>!url - disapprove</LI></UL> The server could track then track these "votes" but I hadn't got as far as thinking about what you might do with them.  </BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000579.html Ad hoc group forming with liveTopics and BlogPlex Wed, 09 Oct 2002 16:42:14 +0100 <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2002/10/09.html#a426">Making group-forming ridiculously easy</A>. Now, the idea is this. When I come across a post on an interesting theme that seems like it might have lasting value, I want to be able to <OL> <LI>Create a topic, with a title of its own and a definition or description in plain English (which may contain arbitrary hyperlinks). Just "where" the topic is stored is unimportant. The important thing is that it is a public entity. <LI>Subscribe to that topic. Subscribing has two effects: it adds the topic to a personal topic list of mine, and it means I'll get posts by other people on that topic in my RSS aggregator because each topic is associated to a shared RSS feed. <LI>Post to that topic whenever I talk about it in my weblog. This has to be *easy*, like checking a box or selecting from a drop-down menu displayed under the box where I write my posts. <LI>Access an archive of posts on that topic somewhere on the Web. <LI>Let anyone edit the description of the topic when important things are added to the "state of the art" on the topic, or when other related topics spring out of the discussion, to let people know where the conversation has branched off.</LI></OL> Basically, from where I stand, this sounds a little like a witch's brew of <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/outlines/liveTopics.html">liveTopics</A>, <A href="http://www.movabletype.org/news/2002_08.shtml#000571">standalone TrackBack</A>, and this peculiar brand of editable web sites known as <A href="http://www2.iro.umontreal.ca/~paquetse/cgi-bin/om.cgi?Wiki">wikis</A>. [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/">Seb's Open Research</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » What you are describing sounds very like the idea behind the <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/2002/05/31.html#a63">BlogPlex Server</A>, for forming ad hoc communities, I put forward a little while back and is the start and endpoint for liveTopics. In order to form BlogPlexes you need enough good metadata in someones weblog to being to make connections between them.  When I looked around I realised categories weren't going to cut it, AI wasn't ready and hence I began working on liveTopics. Obviously since those initial thoughts (which I don't claim are particularly original) I have come across lots of other new ideas like RSS, XFML and so on.  These will all feed in to the design and I think improve it.  For example in considering item (5) one of the powerful features of XFML is to allow us to connect topics together.</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000693.html Trusted trackback Fri, 25 Oct 2002 11:00:30 +0100 I was just thinking about the coming problems with referrer tracking and trackback (et al.) and I wondered whether it would be possible to use PGP like technology to provide trusted sender authentication for pings.   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000773.html Tracking the link cosmos Sat, 30 Nov 2002 08:21:29 +0000 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://ming.tv/flemming2.php/__show_article/_a000010-000307/">Technorati</A>. <A href="http://www.technorati.com" target=_blank>technorati.com</A> is the best site I've seen sofar for showing who links to who's weblogs. Well, mainly I'm interested in who links to what on MY log, mostly to see which stories worked well, and to discover new friends who are exploring similar topics. The other sites that attempt to show connections between weblogs have sofar not shown me much more than I already knew, but in my <A href="http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/links.html?rank=&url=ming.tv&sub=Get+Link+Cosmos" target=_blank>technorati listing</A> I right away get to know some new people. And it is great that in this world, plagiarism is flattery. And a way of voting. I copy somebody else's story, and somebody else copies my copy, and that shows that all of us found it important and interesting. [<A href="http://ming.tv/">Ming's Metalogue</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> I too have become interested in Technorati.  It's like TrackBack in reverse and let's me find where the idea flow that I am participating in has reached in a more concrete fashion than Organica & EcoSystem. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000928.html The Topic Exchange Tue, 14 Jan 2003 09:57:10 +0000 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://blogs.salon.com/0000002/2003/1/14/#200301141">New and improved</A>. Thought I'd mention something new I've been hacking on for the last few evenings. It's not all done yet, but people are e-mailing me about it so here's a bit of an introduction:     <A href="http://topicexchange.com/">The Internet Topic Exchange</A> It's the first (as far as I know) real-life implementation of <A href="http://www.myelin.co.nz/cgi-bin/wcswiki.pl?RidiculouslyEasyGroupForming">Ridiculously Easy Group Forming</A>. Basically, it lets you create sites like <A href="http://www.highcontext.com/kmpings/">KMPings</A> just by filling out a <A href="http://topicexchange.com/new">form</A>. Once you've created one, you can send <A href="http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/">TrackBack</A> pings to it, and see them <A href="http://topicexchange.com/t/test/">like so</A>. There's also <A href="http://topicexchange.com/t/test/rss">RSS</A> for the aggregator junkies. With any luck <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/">Matt Mower</A> will be supporting it with his <A href="http://www.novissio.com/products/liveTopics/liveTopics.html">LiveTopics</A> tool, so it'll be trivial to use from <A href="http://radio.userland.com/">Radio</A> as well. Any suggestions / feature requests? <A title="Click here to comment on this post." href="http://rcs.salon.com/rcsComments/comments?u=2&p=200301141&link=http://blogs.salon.com/0000002/2003/1/14/#200301141">Comment</A> [<A href="http://blogs.salon.com/0000002/">Second p0st</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> Indeed I will be.  I hacked in the basic support for the configuration of this feature last night (since I was working on preferences code anyway).  Adding the ping code as another publishing activity should be trivial. What Phil has done is to implement a very simple, elegant, solution along the path of the BlogPlex idea I've been working towards.  With the Topic Exchange, it will be simple for users to cluster around topics simply by using them. What might be interesting is to combine this with the idea of synonyms (from XFML) so that even when people don't use exactly the same topic name, if they are talking about the same thing, they can still cluster with everyone else!   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001068.html Manilla gets trackback, what about Radio? Wed, 23 Apr 2003 09:20:07 +0100 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> Next set of features for Manila -- optional human-authored summaries for long weblog posts, along with the option, on a per-post basis to include the summary or the full text in the RSS feed. This is the solution for the conundrum that's been circulating in RSS-Land: should feeds include the full posts, or summaries? The answer is to let the author make the decision, and it's not a global, it's made on a per-post basis. The default is full text so people who do short posts never have to think about it. Along with this we'll have both sides of Trackback. We're <A href="http://static3.userland.com/mtweblog/">testing</A> with Moveable Type, but both sides will work without MT. It's not my #1 feature, but it's clear many users want it, so it's going in. [<A href="http://www.scripting.com/">Scripting News</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> Sounds to me like both of these are features that Radio users would like too. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001429.html Implementing Trackback for Radio Userland in 3 easy steps Sat, 14 Jun 2003 10:24:05 +0100 <A href="http://paolo.evectors.it/">Paolo</A> was wondering whether we could setup the <A href="http://www.movabletype.org/docs/tb-standalone.html">standalone Trackback server</A> and use it to implement trackbacks for Radio Userland.  It turns out (as this post proves) that the answer is yes!  All that was required was to install the CGI and then write a <A href="http://matt.blogs.it/gems/trackbackRDF.txt">macro</A> for Radio Userland and embed it in the <A href="http://matt.blogs.it/gems/itemTemplate.txt">#itemTemplate.txt</A>. The macro is supplying the RDF metadata that Trackback depends upon.  In order to allow the standalone trackback server to serve multiple blogs I have added a unique prefix (in my case @matt.blogs.it) to the unique post ID's supplied to the trackback server. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001485.html Trackbacks data in RSS? Sat, 14 Jun 2003 12:35:08 +0100 I'd like an easy way to ping a trackbackable item when I post in Radio.  It seems to me that the easiest way to achieve this would be to have the trackback id embedded in the RSS item (much like the GUID is).  This would allow me to pre-load the URL to ping when posting a commentary on an item. Has someone already come up with an extension for doing this? Update My thanks to <A href="http://philringnalda.com/">Phil Ringnalda</A> who sent me the link to the <A href="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/">trackback module</A> for RSS which provides a way to associate the trackback ping url with an item in a feed.  Exactly what I was looking for!  However when I checked my copy of MovableType I notice that the module is not used by either the 1.0 or 2.0 templates (at least as of 2.63). What gives? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001488.html You've got ping Thu, 10 Jul 2003 09:24:01 +0100 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://markpasc.org/weblog/2003/07/09_thirdparty_trackback_in_radio.html">Third-party TrackBack in Radio</A>. markpasc.org Matt Mower's Python TrackBack server for Radio (and ACLs in PyCS!!). [<A href="http://matt.blogs.it/">Trackback pings for matt_blogs_it</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> Heh.  Nice to see it worked.  This is my first 3rd party, unsolicited, trackback ping to appear in the RSS feed :-) http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001510.html New German language blogging directory Sun, 24 Aug 2003 16:26:31 +0100 <A href="http://www.lumma.de/">Nico Lumma</A> just pinged me to tell me about his <A href="http://www.blogworkorange.de/">companies</A> new blog listing site <A href="http://www.blogg.de/">BLOGG.de</A>.  The site is building a categorized directory of German language blogs and they are using a combination of <A href="http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/">trackback</A> and <A href="http://matt.blogs.it/specs/ENT/1.0/">ENT 1.0</A> to do it. Very cool. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001578.html Mon, 05 Jul 2004 22:15:06 +0100 In <a href="http://www.blogtalk.net/">BlogTalk</a> 2.0 <a href="http://randgaenge.net/">Thomas</a> & crew have, once again, brought together a lot of interesting people & wherever possible conversations are flourishing as evidenced by tonights get together. It was good to meet <a href="http://www.dijest.com/aka/">Phil</a> again after a year and to meet <a href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100875/">Mikel</a> for the first time, especially as his talk prompted lots of interesting ideas we might look at for <a href="http://www.evectors.com/itkcollector/">K-Collector</a>. After a day where I had felt very tired and jaded I found the atmosphere quite reviving. I had the pleasure of dining with <a href="http://paolo.evectors.it/">Paolo</a>, <a href="http://www.markbernstein.org/">Mark Bernstein</a>, <a href="http://www.sumofmyparts.com/blog/">Stephanie Hendrick</a>, and <a href="http://blog.humlab.umu.se/therese">Therese Örnberg</a>. Mark gave a very interesting keynote this morning which provoked lots of questions for me. Stephanie & Therese gave, I think, the most stylish presentation of the day (including an amusing near-death audioblog to end) and their discussion of presence and spaces was stimulating. From my perspective a happy coincidence that we all ended up together. We had an interesting discussion about a range of topics spanning language, blogging, literary discourse, topics, flame wars, comments & trackbacks, software tools and how you build them, tinderbox, Dave Allen, and test first development. Taking antibiotics means I cannot drink alchohol so my opinions whilst maybe better formed were far less robust than usual & I was open to colonization ;-) I got persuaded that comments are bad and that even trackback requires considerable architectural revision to work properly. Mark's suggestion of making trackback default to being private (i.e. you get a file of trackbacks and you decide what, if anything, to do with them) seems to be a good one. I think this can be assisted by some sort of intelligent filtering of trackback contents & authorship to help you decide about those you do & don't want to handle. I think emulating the LinkedIn FOAFOAFOAFOAF network model could be useful in this regard. Also, based on comments by Stephanie and Mark, I have finally concluded that I must do something in K-Collector for the <a href="http://blog.mathemagenic.com/">Lilia's</a> and <a href="http://www.mcgeesmusings.net/">Jim McGee's</a> of this world who used (and maybe still cling to) <a href="http://www.google.com/search?num=20&hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=livetopics&btnG=Search">liveTopics</a>. I think that part of my problem has been misunderstanding where they are coming from. liveTopics, for me, was a stepping stone towards a larger vision which, at that time, I couldn't achieve. But for them it was actually what they were looking for. No wonder then that I've had a hard time convincing them that K-Collector is better. I haven't quite worked out the answer yet but I think it may be as simple as offering some kind of discriminator where you can choose whether K-Collector should default to showing you only your own work, or the work of the community as a whole. We may even have enough smarts in the database to do this without requiring additional work but I'll have to get some clear space (i.e. after <a href="http://stes.evectors.com/">STES</a>) to think this through properly. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002399.html Do it in your own backyard Wed, 07 Jul 2004 20:07:50 +0100 I thought it would be useful for me to jot down some of my thoughts about dropping comments & trackback while I can still remember them. I used to think that comments & trackbacks as they exist in todays weblogs were a good idea. Mark's <a href="http://blogtalk.net/bernsteinm.html">keynote</a> at BlogTalk 2.0 and our subsequent conversations have converted me to his way of thinking. Here is my best anology (so far) for understanding the situation as it is today: Imagine that you really don't like me. One evening you get mad at me and drive over to my house where you daub the message "Matt Mower is a total asshole" in bright yellow paint on my walls for everyone to see. The next day I start in horror on seeing this and spend the morning cleaning it off. You may not have signed your work which is lucky for you because I spend the afternoon driving round town with my paintball gun looking to get even. After you've done this a few times I get the message and protect my walls so that nobody can write on them. But you're not done yet. Since you can't deface my walls any more you go around the neighbourhood painting your message on other peoples walls whether they agree with your message or not. There's not much I can do about it, I probably can't even help them scrub their own walls. The neighbourhood becomes divided over the issue and heated and pointless arguments break out all around. Note that you haven't daubed your own walls with your message of hate. I think it would be very different if that was what you had to do. I think the inevitable consequence of that would be that you would have to learn to be more moderate or people would stop coming by. Our comments form part of the overall picture of what sort of person we seem to be. But our comments are dispersed over the many sites we visit. One here, one there, dotted about. Even though they may bear our name the association is made weaker by their not being collected under it and taken together. If all our comments appeared in one place (our blog) we couldn't so easily escape from them. They would take their place as part of our whole online persona. Anyone whose blog consisted entirely of vitriol and hatred would probably end up ostrasized. But it would be our choice. Note that I'm not talking about restricting free speech. If people wanted to go visit such sites and read what was said there, that's fine.  Even if it's about me. If people think something is fair comment, they can quote it just like always. But the point is that it's in their back yard, not in mine (nor spread - unwittingly - around the neighbourhood) and that they have to take action to do so. Unfair and unsupported comment will stay where it belongs, hung around the neck of it's author. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002412.html Commenting on the comments Sat, 10 Jul 2004 09:39:37 +0100 I have had a couple of comments to my <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/2004/07/07.html#a1516">last post on comments</a>. I accept the points raised but wanted to point out that what I describe in that post is only 1 dimension of what is wrong with comments/trackbacks today. There are at least two more.  I just wanted to get that analogy down while I could think of it. The problems with comments/trackback are soluable and, through these solutions, I believe we would end up with a better infrastructure for the blogosphere than the one we have now. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002416.html