I hand over a few dollars each month to Six Apart, who own Typepad, for this blog. There are free ones, of course (blogger for one) but when I started off I decided that Trackbacks were worth paying for. If you make a post about an entry on someone’s blog, then you can add a trackback, which is a link from their blog post to yours. It looked to me like a valuable part of the conversational aspect of blogs.
But it seems that trackbacks are doomed. I don’t think blogger ever supported them. And now many blogs have disabled them, because all you get is trackback spam which is a pain in the neck to deal with. I’ve noticed that they seem to be going the way of the dodo, and now I see that Trackbacks Are Dead. It’s a shame – one more victim of the plague of spam.
But this little corner of the web is quiet enough I still have trackbacks enabled.
The way blogspot works is that we can enable something called “links to this post” and then if someone creates a link to it, we can see it. I had never checked my links before I read this entry of yours, and wow – it’s pretty cool. I don’t get a lot of links, but there are definitely more than my Technorati ranking (61,734th) would indicate. It almost gives me the illusion of being “read”.
I didn’t know those existed. I think that it is purely internal to blogger/blogspot weblogs though. I can’t see how to link to a blogger weblog from a typepad one.