A fairly quick implementation/example of this would be if James had
his server do a google search for each of his web pages periodically,
then post the results at the end of each page saying, "The following
links refer to this page, and may yield further information on this
subject:"

The google search would be:
link:http://www.piclist.com/techref/microchip/devprogs.htm
for the programmer's page.

Thus if you add a link to the programmer page above, then eventually a
link to your site is added automatically to the programmer page.

But trackback is usally used in blogs so the bloggers don't have to
work to see how many other bloggers picked up their story and
propogated it.  It's a prestige thing in many cases, and yields no
useful information for the viewer, as far as I can tell.

I don't know that it would be particularily useful for the piclist,
especially since it could easily be abused.  If someone thought it was
useful, then I'd simply suggest a link on each page to the actual
google search link:http://www.piclist.com/techref/microchip/devprogs.htm
rather than mining the results and adding them to the page.  But then
Olin's page would never become a link on the piclist without someone
adding it by hand.

So in this case it's not particularily applicable.

-Adam

On 1/25/06, Danny Sauer <piclist@dannysauer.com> wrote:
> Olin wrote regarding 'Re: [OT] what about "wiki"' on Wed, Jan 25 at 10:26:
> > Alex Harford wrote:
> > > In the blogging world, that is called a 'trackback', and can be done
> > > automatically.  Unfortunately this requires both websites to
> > > cooperate.
> >
> > That sounds like a recipe for disaster.  How could some automatic process
> > possibly know which pages should be linked to and put an intelligent comment
> > by the link?
>
> It's not fully automatic, typically.  It's more like citing a
> reference (manually), and the page which is cited automatically
> generates a reciprocal link to the site which referred to it.  Except,
> instead of just a citation, it can just be a manually entered related
> blog entry.  Or at least, that's how I understand it - I don't use any
> of the "social networking" stuff on my blog.  For that matter, I
> generally don't even like referring to the blog as a blog - that term
> just irritates curmudgeonly ol' me.  It's a single-user bulletin
> board, or a notepad - but not a blog. :)
>
> --Danny
> --
> http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
> View/change your membership options at
> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist
>

-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist