What is TrackBack?

트랙백이란?
MT의 트랙백 기능이 지금처럼 인코딩에 제한적이지 않았다면,
조금 더 많은 사람들이 이용하지 않았을까?

TRACKBACK
Movable Type’s TrackBack system allows peer-to-peer communication and conversations between weblogs. Imagine that you write about a movie you just saw in an entry on your Movable Type-powered weblog. Another MT weblogger reads your entry, and wants to write an entry referencing your original post. He could just comment on your weblog, but he’d like to keep the post in his own database and host it on his site.

Using TrackBack, the other weblogger can automatically send a ping to your weblog, indicating that he has written an entry referencing your original post. This accomplishes two things:

On your site, you can automatically list all sites that have referenced a particular post, allowing visitors to your site to read the response on the other user’s weblog.

It provides a firm, explicit link between his entry and yours, as opposed to an implicit link (like a referrer log) that depends upon outside action (someone clicking on the link to your entry).

You can use TrackBack for more than just communication on particular entries, however. You can also associate TrackBack pings URLs with categories in your weblog. Whenever you post an entry to that category, the URLs you have associated will automatically be notified of your post. This allows remote sites to keep a repository of references to posts all around the web.

For example, if you run a site about Perl, you might want to provide a repository of links to Perl articles on other weblogs. Using TrackBack, you can allow other weblogs to ping a particular category in your own weblog, whenever a new entry is posted that pertains to this category.

These are just examples of TrackBack usage. TrackBack itself is a framework for peer-to-peer communication between weblogs; it can track cross-weblog discussions, it can provide remote content repositories, it can emulate guest authoring, etc. The technical side of TrackBack is very simple: when you want to notify a remote site of your existence, you send a ping to that site. The format of these pings (simple HTTP GET requests) is discussed below. In the Movable Type implementation of TrackBack, we’ve added password protection to category pings, IP banning, automatic RSS output, and email notification of new pings.

In other words: we want TrackBack to benefit, and to be useful to, more than just Movable Type users. We want to encourage integration of this feature into other weblog tools; that’s why we have documented the ping format below and have tried to make the basic framework very simple. Feel free to email us (trackback@movabletype.org) if you have questions.