So, how does a trackback work?

[Bill]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

Lastly, how do you plan to keep track of comments? If I spam your blog with "relevant" comments and you only leave one comment on my blog, then its not a fair trade

That's part of the reason that using comments as the vector for linking didn't occur or appeal to me at first - I'm used to "giving" links, which pretty much has to be done by hand, is fairly easy to check, and it's part of the older linking culture.

Leaving comments open has a few problems - for example, will "legitimate" partner comments get lost in akismet? Will people we don't want to link to, enter comments that we end up accepting?

Right now I just want to mess with it a bit and see how it works.

I figure the comment emails one gets will let us track it enough, for now at least. Like you said, we don't want to go wild with it.

I still mostly want to explore the idea of putting permalinks to other people's more unique blog posts in posts, to make oneway interior-to-interior page links.

I figure some trackbacking would be fine, but you were right, trackbacking isn't a method that would help much.