I’m sick of expaining the difference between comments and trackbacks to people. For the last time:
Comments are comments are comments. Trackbacks are comments. Readers want to see what other people have to say about your post, they couldn’t care less if someone made the comment on your blog, blogged about it themselves, emailed it to you, or muttered it in their sleep.
In A Beginner’s Guide to TrackBack, Ben and Mena ramble for a bit and then get to the point and say:
“This is a form of remote comments.”
Separating comments to your posts in your blog’s UI into two lists, ‘Comments’ and ‘Trackbacks’ is confusing to the reader. In the pending redesign of this site, all comments will be displayed below their respective post in chronological order. No distinction will be made between the different types of comments, nor is such any distinction necessary. Let’s quit making blogging any more confusing than it should be.
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I don’t really agree. I do agree that the difference between the two is somewhat subtle and it is confusing, but I don’t agree that they’re the same thing. I often reference other articles in posts, but I wouldn’t say my posts are comments on that article. They’re related, or possibly inspired by that article,but they would be totally out of place as comments on that article.
But yes, it’s confusing, and I give you props for trying to simply it for users.
I personally find it annoying as hell finding this is the middle of a comment thread:
“Is ‘trackbacks’ a needed term in the world of blogging? LexBlog’s IT Director, Jesse Newland, thinks not. Trackbacks are comments is his argument, let’s not confuse the world by using the term trackbacks. Comments are comments are comments. Trackbacks …”
It’s totally out of place and as far as I’m concerned complete rubbish. It confuses the thread. It would be better placed in a separate list of “Other sites talking about this post”.
Lol. Nice comments form. It doesn’t even let you know you’ve posted.
Sadly, I disagree! I think that the idea behind trackback was a good idea but the practical use makes them very different from comments. Comments will directly follow up the post with additional opinion or information whereas the typical trackback will be something along the lines of john doe said xyz. This is totally irrelevant when you have just read the original xyz. For trackbacks to be real comments requires too much discipline from the user posting it. To make it work a user needs to refrain from making a trackback unless he is adding something to the original post, this is a difficult proposition as that will have negative traffic impact on his own site. Secondly when he has something to add to the original post he needs to edit the quoted text (not sure this is possible with all tools) to remove the “noise” he was forced to make in his “comment” a coherent post on his own site.
I find it interesting that there are sites that do call trackbacks comments including high-profile Boing Boing. Clicking on the comments link to any entry takes you to Technorati listing the sites that link (or trackback) to that entry. I can see where this could be confusing to someone who’s not familiar with this type of relationship.
It seems to me that comments are a direct response to an entry or another comment while a trackback is a form of citation back to the source of information.
Considering the comments here (what no trackbacks?) now I wonder how much responsibility should be thrust upon the average user to learn the difference between a comment or a trackback instead of the developer stuck trying to continually Fisher-Price conventions.