Question 2: Not quite true. A blog author receives a trackback and it is a way of them knowing where something they have blogged about has “gone”. It is a way of communicating between bloggers. A third party has no way of knowing, other than a reference to a trackback on a blog post. You see them here on this blog in the comments of a story. But I can delete that trackback in the comments, so I guess I can allow them or not. Trackbacks are a great way to get exposure on A list blogs - if they display them. Certain A list blogs not don’t. Beats me why.

Another way to acknowledge a source is to point to it in the blog post - this will also theoretically creat a trackback, it depends how the blog is set up. You can see this in this post at the bottom of it.

Then you get the situation where you don’t acknowledge a source at all. I don’t source stuff that comes from “everywhere”. That is stuff you could find on about 50,000 blogs with a simple Google search. Basically - it is common knowledge and I could not be bothered going through blog posts looking for dates! I sourced you because you are a listener and you were the first person that I heard it from. I later read my feeds and there were a few blogs talking about it but not that many

Hope that answers your question(s)

@Dave - Yeah, after I made my post, I thought about trackbacks and how they work and realized that those trackbacks/pingbacks generally allow you to track content as it spreads across the web, granted the content that is spreading has to have originated from your own site and or blog correct? Also, the author sharing the piece of content would have to do so in a certain way as to allow the pingback/trackback to be accurate?

So there is your new Web 2.0 service idea. Create a service that somehow tracks a piece of content whether it be an article or a video or whatever else, and create a visual representation of that content traveling across the web.