Trackback and using the blog for knowledge

One thing that I noticed today while looking at a couple of people's blogs is the trackback feature. Of course since Google just buys companies and never brings their free technology to a competitive level this capability isn't natively available in Blogger. You can get it. I am still trying to figure out exactly what it is but from what I can gather the trackback allows you to add a link that tells the blog that you are linking to that you linked to it. By doing so the blog can link out into a set of comments posted on other sites. I'm going to play with this because for the Viapoint project we are looking to create a blog and it would be an especially neat trick to post trackback enabled posts as responses to related blogs. So if an important blogger in the Viapoint space is writing something about desktop search we can link into it with our response/ideas and the trackback on their site will link to us. I can see how this can lead to a form of trackback spamming but we won't go there just yet.

I also found an interesting use for my blog today. I used it as a personal knowledgebase. I had written about a company that makes chips that link to your brain but I couldn't remember what it was called and I wanted to email a friend about it. So I searched my website for the word brain and bingo - it was the third entry.