In My Experience... | Randomness offers a benefit, but only randomly. (2532)

iframe and Doctype follies. « prev
I still use html tables. » next

Randomness offers a benefit, but only randomly.
[ Posted by Dan on January 03, 2003 | 5 Comments ]

As mentioned last week, I'm engaged in a redesign process right now after 14 long months with this current UI (that I never really liked anyway). I also mentioned I was going to make a spot available for people to ping using TrackBack, but LazyWeb has beat me to it. An important difference will remain though, and may be helpful to my implementation.

LazyWeb is for anyone to ping. With legions of bloggers, the pings at LazyWeb are going to be numerous and random, which may be its element of success or failure. I am sure there are folks who putz around the blogosphere looking for stories about the pets of people they have never met or the vagarities of semantics when applied to data warehousing. I care about specific thing, not things that are presented to me randomly, so I'm guessing I'll visit LazyWeb as often as I hit weblogs.com these days (read: never).

What success could I expect with my experiment in accepting pings? Probably not a lot, since I don't see much traffic thru these pages. However, those who do come around on a consistent basis (as defined as daily or monthly, etc.) might benefit from targeted pings that might appear on this site. I'm guessing that any ping that do come in will be more 'on topic' to the thing I talk about and cover here. I suppose it would be a good idea for me to solicit people who run blogs like Arcade Zen to ping this site when they post.

Quinn Mcdonald seems to keep his linking of like minded sites to a focused few, and that sort of filtering keeps things relevant (although just barely sometimes) for me when I'm surfing around the blogosphere.

Randomness offers a benefit, but only randomly. I am hopeful that I can beat that with the redesigned version of this site when it goes live. And by the way Quinn, a screenshot will be posted soon :) I'm still working out some particulars and then want to do a call for comments.

Care to enlighten the non-bloggers out here with what exactly pingback and trackback are?

I've recently installed the b2 weblog for a couple of friends who wanted to try weblogging, and it has both features, but no explanation of either.

-Posted by JC on January 3, 2003 05:27 PM

The term 'pingback' is new to me, but I'll wager it's no too diff from TrackBack. Everything you might want to know about TrackBack is at...

http://www.moveabletype.org/docs/mtmanual_trackback.html

Other blogging systems have integrated the technology, but this is the original source.

-Posted by Dan on January 3, 2003 06:29 PM

I've never been a big fan of randomly searching blogs, myself. Most/all of the blogs that I read are of people I know from somewhere other than blogging. Ironically, I came upon your blog by chance, so I guess once in a while the random method works. ;)

-Posted by milbertus on January 3, 2003 08:46 PM

I've had to stay focused on less than 100 blogs - otherwise, I'd *never* get anything done!

I try to stick to a certain type of blog, and keep mt "blog reading time" under control. I'm probably at 15 a day, and that expands to 40 a week. Ugh. Randomly bloggrolling dilutes the otherwise excellent ones you want to support.

-Posted by Quinn on January 5, 2003 12:13 PM

finally found an explanation of trackback and pingback from the b2 product:

"Trackback and pingback are almost identical except that pingbacks are automatically "pinged" when you put a link in your blg. If this link is of another blog post, your blogging software sends a part of your post to the other party, which gets associated with that particular post.

"On the other hand, trackback is done with a special URL that you can get from the other party's blogging software. In b2, for example, you would click on "trackback" to get your special trackback URL. To trackback someone, you would have to get this URL somehow, probably through a link, and paste it in the trackback field within b2edit page. "

-Posted by JC on January 6, 2003 01:02 PM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).