I visited a lot of sites today where people have been discussing TrackBack; while the general opinion has been very positive, there are a few users who have mentioned that, at this point, they just "don't get it."
This was totally expected. The reason? Interesting implementations of the feature require the critical mass that would be gained by other developers integrating the feature (or a variation that supports TrackBack) into their own tools.
A related reason is that we're all still at the novelty stage where the TrackBacking is done more for test purposes; again, interesting and successful implementations require context.
Interestingly, the method of using TrackBack that is being most discussed -- the ping between entries as a way to referencing individual posts -- evolved from TrackBack's original purpose: Category pinging.
Tonight (before I took a five hour nap), I was hoping to set up a section of movabletype.org to receive pings from posts related to certain fairly general categories. This too, would be more a test of the feature rather than a true contextual example. Why? Well, because it would be quite difficult to decide on what categories needed to be represented and how granular they should be. And, would we or should we expect users to set up their categories based on an imposed taxonomy?
Let's use posts related to Perl as an example:
Say (in a very abbreviated form) we set up category repositories in this way:
Topic: Perl
Category: Programming
-->Subcategory: Graphics
-->Subcategory: XML
-->Subcategory: Database
Category: Tutorials
Category: Core modules
Category: Security
Category: Perl 6 development
I'm assuming, for this example, that one would be using the category --> category pinging method; when using the entry --> category method on a case-by-case method, some of these categorization problems seem a little less evident.
So, what if in your set of categories, you just post about "Perl" -- that's your category; Where does it fit? If there was a general dump all Perl-related posts in a category such as "Perl: General," would that remove the value of categorization in the first place?
These are all questions that we will want to address as we continue to build TrackBack; though, I'm not quite sure there are any answers that we can all agree on.
In the vein of distributed taxonomies, I was thinking that a somewhat useful feature might be a way to import/export your category list. If you are the "master repository" of a certain topic and have compiled a fairly detailed category and subcategory set that readers (and TrackBack pingers) of your weblog might want to follow, then distributing the set would be built-into the system. And, maybe we can go even further with not having to manually export/import the list but somehow transfer between systems!
I'm getting ahead of myself.
For now, how about sending me lists of what categories you use and once I get enough and am able to pull out the most often-used categories, I'll compile some sort of test category pinging section on movabletype.org.
Posted by Mena at June 28, 2002 03:01 AM