CNET News.com supports Trackback and Pingback.

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Check out this link to News.com and you’ll see that they’re accepting trackbacks and pingbacks from blogs now. How friggin’ cool is that? That particular page is for trackbacks to the news item I discussed in my previous entry.

This is still in the testing phase it appears as I didn’t see any way to access that page from the article itself and the trackback code doesn’t auto-discover yet. I only found out about it from an entry at Photo Matt’s blog where he discusses it and reveals how to craft a URL to get to the trackback page for an item. He points out that most of the pings News.com has received so far are from Pingback enabled blogs as the auto-discovery code for that seems to be working OK. I had to open up the source view and hunt for the Trackback URL about midway through the code in order to ping it from SEB. The Pingback code was right at the top of the page.

Speaking of which, can someone please explain to me what differences (if any) there are between trackback and pingback? I’ve read the technical documentation on both and I’m no clearer on what one offers over the other.

11 thoughts on “CNET News.com supports Trackback and Pingback.”

  2. Trackback was first, and then Simon (and others) over at incutio.com came up with the idea of making a process that is a little more automatic.

    Trackbacks are kind of a way to make relational links among weblogs. You are basically sending information about your entry to another site and saying, “Hey, I wrote an entry that is related to yours, here is a little snippet from it.”

    Pingbacks are a way of showing how weblogs are connected. It takes the links in your entry and tries to ping the originating server of those links. Saying to that server, “Hey we linked to you.”

    Trackback is more conscious of the admin, and it is often more relevant to the pinged entry. Pingbacks are quite nice on following how an idea or piece of information has spread throughout the web.

    From the pMachine forums

  5. I plan on writing a Pingback Vs. Trackback (non-tech speak) article. Stay tuned.

    EE seems like it’s a powerful publishing solution. It might have pingbacks already and just need them turned on in the settings or config’d for them. I’d suggest email EE and see if you already have pingback support.

  8. Here’s one the more straightforward explanations I’ve seen on pingback and trackback:

    In the pingback model, the client does the work of finding the pingback server, and then invokes a simple XML-RPC call to that server with the two URIs. In the Trackback model, the client has to do all the work of finding the trackback server, which includes mapping the permalink to the trackback ID by parsing some RDF. The client then has to call the server using the constructed URI, which then (depending on the implementation) has to map this ID back to the permalink.

    BTW: Here’s an interesting comparison chart showing the features of the mainstream blogs and which are utilizing pingback and trackback,

  10. LOL,

    Say, I really like that car you’re driving.

    You don’t mind if I paste a few advertisements to it, do ya?

    (busts out a gluestick and a Domino’s flyer)

  11. Damn, the spammers are busy today. That last one was particularly annoying as they’re using various free hosting services so I was loathe to ban the root URL outright. If I get any more like that, though, I’ll do just that.

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