It must be admitted that I am a newbie when it comes to some of the new blog terminology out there. After writing the snippet about TheRegisters interview of an unnamed link spammer, I wanted to know more about the “traceback” feature of blogs, what it means, how it works, that sort of thing.

I found my answers and figured I’d share them here so other people can get an answer in Google to the What is a traceback? question. A traceback (also called a “trackback” by some) is used as an alternative to posting a big comment on someone else’s blog. Instead, you post about the subject on your own blog, and then put a traceback URL in pointing to the post on the other blog your post is referring to. The blog with the story you were posting about receives the traceback and can include a link to your blog article in their own system. It is basically a form of content aggregation between web sites.

The talk about traceback spamming is I presume when some nasty type posts tracebacks to your blog that link back to spammers blogs trying to flog all manner of stuff you usually read about in spam. (or try not to read about as is most likely the case.) So there you have it, a traceback/trackback is a method of automatically cross linking articles of similiar subject matter between blogs. There is a pretty good explaination of traceback/trackback at the movable type blog site here.

Microsoft have been playing around with their own search technology for ages now, and had a working beta that I’ve mentioned here a couple of times before. Well, now they have rolled it out in place of their previous Yahoo results. It will be interesting to see how that affects our hits from MSN, as their new system seems to produce results more like Google’s then Yahoo’s. And we fair pretty well with Google. I’d say it will be years before they have a service as clean as Google, but one thing Microsoft has in big heaped piles, is money, they can simply throw money at their search engine until it’s good. (They already have it seems) And Microsoft have one of the best marketing departments in the IT industry. Even the truth can’t stop a good marketing campaign over there. Google is in for a fight, because you can bet MSN search will be built into everything in the next version of Windows due out in 2006/2007. Think I’ll stick with Google, I just trust them more.

Read more at Eweek.

Glad I don’t know what a haiku is if it makes you think like this! Fortunately I don’t have that much to write about that is negative. Still interesting site to ramble around when you are tired of coding.

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