Dean is thinking of turning off trackbacks:
I’m thinking very very hard about getting rid of trackbacks entirely because I’m tired of spam, I’m tired of people using them just to heap abuse on my head, and I can’t keep up with them anyway. There are over 700 trackbacks I haven’t had the chance to review yet, and that’s starting to seem ridiculous. Maybe I should just switch to Technorati instead of trackbacks? Anyone know how to code that?
I’ve noticed that more and more blogs seem to be eliminating trackbacks. On a smaller blog like The Glittering Eye, spam isn’t that much of a problem. My anti-spam add-on program which is truly wonderful does 99.9% of the work for me. But on a large, popular blog like Dean’s World I can see how it could be a headache. I think the real solution is for PowerBlogs to improve their anti-spam measures.
This does bring up an additional thought, however. It seems to me that the very definition of a blog is a personal web page with permalinks, comments, and trackbacks. The more of these things the blog has, the more “bloggy” it is. With permalinks but neither comments nor trackbacks, Instapundit is barely a blog at all. With all three Dean’s World is quite bloggy.
I’ve found the trackbacks to The Glittering Eye to be a very handy way of identifying blogs that are new and interesting to me. Tracking back is the sincerest form of flattery. Technorati seems to be on the fritz about 10% of the time and cumbersome about 90% of the time.
So what’s a small-fry to do? Comments aren’t a particularly efficient way of getting noticed unless you’re mercilessly self-promoting. I’ve had other bloggers go for years of my comments without noticing I had a blog of my own. Without trackbacks the only real recourse is email which must be an enormous problem for bloggers like Dean and Glenn Reynolds. I suspect that they ignore most email and either just let it pile up or only read email from folks they know.
I’ve wondered about Glenn’s email habits too, as he must have a huge amount to sort through.
I used to send Glenn stuff every other day or so, just random observations about stuff he linked or that he might find interesting, and rarely expected or got replies. I worried I was bothering him, so I asked him if it was just annoying him, but he said “Keep ’em coming!” I think he’s replied maybe half a dozen times (I’ve never asked for a response).
Once he published an email I sent, which I found oddly exhilarating, so I started putting some of my comments on other sites on a blog, and sent him entries I thought he might find interesting, which he occasionally linked.
I am fortunate in that Fluffy (the mu.nu firewall) has a filter that apparently deals with the vast majority of spam. With over a hundred active bloggers, the blacklist is kept well up to date. I like to know when I get noticed so the few trackback spam I have to deal with are worth the effort.
As for getting myself noticed, comments, trackbacks and carnivals all work well. The wondrous thing is how long they keep generating hits. I have a couple of posts which have been steady producers of three or four hits per month for the last year and a half. I keep linking to one of those blogs whenever I find a good reason to do so.