MovableBlog: My Name in Print
November 20, 2004
Rogers Cadenhead is someone I've had respect for as a writer on RSS, Java, and especially—though I used the software all of twice—Radio Userland. In March of this year, he asked my permission to publish a screenshot of the Trackback listing of my review of the TypePad hosted blogging service in his then-forthcoming book on Movable Type. I agreed, being honoured just for having been asked. This month, his book Movable Type 3 Bible, Desktop Edition hit the stores. While in Portland, Oregon, visiting friends, I stopped by the Powell's Technical Bookstore and asked if they had a copy (but not before looking for it myself). When presented with the copy, looking at the section for Trackback, and seeing myself and my website referred to in print—for the first time, my knowledge—over two pages no less, the purchase decision was an easy one.
The following are the relevant paragraphs:
read the rest of this articleFigure 11-1 shows how trackback links are presented in MovableBlog, a weblog by Richard Eriksson (
http://movableblog.com/). His site is devoted to poking around Movable Type, and when he wrote an entry reviewing Six Apart's TypePad hosting service, his review was discussed on six other weblogs. These weblogs sent trackback messages to Eriksson's server that were received by Movable Type and saved to his weblog's database.
As a means of receiving feedback on your work, trackback is comparable to receiving comments in response to an entry— but in this case the comments are hosted on someone else's weblog. On MovableBlog, Eriksson presents trackback links on the same page as comments, enabling his visitors to see the kind of feedback each of his entries has received. Mena and Ben Trott, inventors of the protocol, call it a form of remote commenting.