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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Merging comments and pingbacks

Tantek:

[...] we now have Trackback and Pingback to help automate generating comment hyperlinks to blog-on-blog commentary. While I certainly applaud these efforts at automating the plumbing, I must ask—why is there any distinction in the presentation? I ask because many blogs present separate and different interfaces for their comments, trackbacks, and/or pingbacks.

A comment is a comment is a comment. Why should it matter whether it was posted using a web form, sent via email, entered into a blog, or posted to Netnews? From a blog reader’s perspective, I’d just like to see a list of the comments, and not care (nor know) about how the comment got there. Presentation/interface should be designed to present the data (information), not the underlying plumbing.

Good point (besides, I’m kind of fed up of having a seperate counter for comments and pingbacks under every post). I’m sure I’ve seen a blog that combines comments, pingbacks and trackbacks in to the same interface—I think it was Sam Ruby’s and I’m sure I’ve seen it elsewhere as well. Something else to add to the list for the forever forthcoming redesign.

Posted 5th January 2003 at 11:17 am

This is Merging comments and pingbacks by Simon Willison, posted on 5th January 2003.

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4 comments

  1. Agreed. Also from a usability perspective Pingbacks and Trackbacks are confusing. I've only recently begun browsing the blog community and when I started I was baffled by what all these terms were, comments I was familiar with but Pingbacks? I still don't really know what they are and clicking on the link doesnt tell me what they are, so in the manner of a "typical" webuser, I ignore them :-) Anyone who cares to enlighten me however, feel free.

    Daniel Nolan - 5th January 2003 16:59 - #

  2. Well, the people with less curmudgeonly ideas about it will wish they got here first, but too bad for them: The difference is that TrackBack was intended as a way to create cross-blog conversational threads: if I felt that readers of this post would also want to read my post on the same subject, then I would send it a TrackBack ping, while Pingback was created as a way to automatically inform the owner of a linked-to site that you linked to them: if I made a post saying "Simon talks about intermingling comments and *backs" which nobody reading his post would want to read, but I want to be sure Simon knows I linked to him then I would send him a Pingback, which he could then display as a badge of honor ("See, this many people linked to me"). Then, of course, once people get ahold of something they muddle it all up, so now people who like the way Pingback works better than the way TrackBack works use only Pingback for both purposes, and then Ben fought the Pingback menace by putting autodiscovery TrackBack into Movable Type, so that TrackBack has become completely debased by people sending TrackBack pings when all they were doing was linking without having something new or interesting to say. That probably doesn't make it any more clear, but at least I'll feel better for a couple of minutes ;)

    Phil Ringnalda - 5th January 2003 18:14 - #

  3. Right, so if I've got this correct, TrackBack is used to relate articles together all on the same topic that the user may find interesting. PingBack is basically telling another user that you linked to them? So if im correct in this, then I can assume the Aquarionics PingBack is actually a TrackBack? I still think the terminology however is somewhat lacking, most of the webdev blogs rant about usability everyday and yet use something that on first glimpse makes the user ask "eh?" but fails to communicate to the user what exactly it is. Perhaps the term "Related Links" would be more useful.

    Daniel Nolan - 5th January 2003 23:20 - #

  4. The purpose of Pingback is very simple - it's a mechanism to allow you to tell a site (that also supports Pingback) that you have linked to them. The only difference between a pingback ping and a referrer log entry is that with a pingback you can say that you linked to them from a specific page (in the case of a blog entry you want them to know that you have linked from that particular entry, not from your blog's front page). TrackBack is more like an "I've commented on your post" feature although to be honest it always confused me which is why I helped develop Pingback :) The best half way house is probably Mark Pilgrim's system, which uses referrals but then parses HTML in all kinds of weird ways to grab the paragraph / div talking about his site and figure out the permalink, if one exists. It's pretty advanced though.

    Simon Willison - 5th January 2003 23:34 - #

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