teaching my class about trackbacks

how do you get rid of trackback spam: i got hit with the same machine that spammed your site and i shut off the trackback: but i think that the trackback feature was is the most important feature to develop an audience.

Been keeping up with alex halavais's site as well but still, i have not gotten an audience, maybe its the writting style, maybe the content? don't know.

found similar blogs on the topic of surveillance, but its hard to connect with them: its as if there are bloggers who blog and its tough to get into their social network, ect. thats the power of this blogging thing and it taps into human interaction and cooperativeness; but people are cautious because of fear?

But let me focus on this spam, which is really undermining my freedom of speech: is there a specific lecture, or how to, that can stop the trackback spam.

PS i also figured out that it is important to cut, paste and save a template before changing it...ect...

stef

I don't see the usefulness of trackbacks when there is Technorati's feature that lets you see what blogs are linking to your posts. If that type of thing was integrated into blogs automatically without Technorati, what would be the point of trackbacks?

The main thing that comes to my mind is that all Technorati data is stored elsewhere, and trackbacks are in the same database the blog that got pinged is. In other words I "own" the trackbacks that were send to me. Integrating technorati would probably still mean external storage. External services might be offline (technorati doesn't work all the time), might disappear etc. If info is important I want to be able to store it locally too.

At the moment Technorati only tracks part of the blogs, and thus gives an incomplete picture. Just as Trackback or pingback isn't supported by all blogsystems (and even then, I can choose per link if I want to ping or not). I don't really see how that picture will get complete. These are distributed conversations in distributed systems. No way to get it all into the daylight, other than turning it into a hierarchical system I think, and that would kill blogging effectively.

I am using my referrerlogs, technorati (and others like blogdex), and my trackbacks to get a picture of who's linking to me. If the linker looks interesting I add them to my bookmarks, rss-feed etc. I also put the url of links to me in the commentsection a lot if they didn't trackback, to make sure that I can find them back, but also that my readers can follow the discussion going on elsewhere.

The internet, and thus the blogosphere is messy by design. No one tool will do it all, or create complete overviews. It will be mixing and patching things to do that. Just as in the rest of my life. Not everything I hear is in the paper, I hear gossip, stories, radio, phone-calls, whatnot and together it makes a picture of my world.

It would seem that trackback is switched off for this weblog. At least, I was unable to extablish one.

jcwinnie, trackback is not switched off for this weblog--I have it enabled for all of my posts. (See the list of recent trackbacks in the sidebar, for example.)

What kind of error did you encounter? Could it have been a timeout? (The blog has been slow lately...I may have to switch to dynamic entries.) Or was it refused outright?

Stef, the best defense against trackback spam is keeping mt-blacklist updated. I've had some problems lately, as well, and I'm hoping Jay will add a "despam" command to the new version *soon*.

Jessica, Ton responded before I could--Technorati is a centralized database. If they go down (which they're wont to do), my link data goes with them. Trackbacks are integrated directly into my weblog. They're true p2p technology, rather than server-based, and I prefer that.

Liz: Okay, I see that your test worked, and, so have tried again from this end.

Ah, it would seem that the problem is at this end. Trackback / Pingbacks had worked with earlier versions of Wordpress, so I wrongly assumed that the feature worked with the current version.