Pingbacks in comments - bad?

[Simon]

Sometimes things get murkier and murkier before they clear. Personally I'm still way down in the murk on pingbacks, trackbacks, and tagging.

Let me try a specific question that came to me today when I was reading Walrus' XXXBlogManiac. On that blog I saw this post "Porn Flakes - Breakfast with a Boner," which reminded me of the "Perverted Breakfast Cereals" post on my XLog.

My question is, what would be the best way for both of us to make some use of this?

I was trying to decide between posting a comment on Walrus' blog, or editing my older Cereals post to add a link to his new post, or making a new post mentioning both Cereal posts. Then I read this thread again and realized it might be worth asking here. Particularly about how to use pingbacks, trackbacks, or tagging as those might relate to this kind of thing.

Any suggestions welcome.

[walrus]

In your instance, I would create a new post and trackback to my post. The reason is that with the trackback not only does it add your link to the comments section but it also adds an excerpt from your post. I would probably just add a link to the original post (creating a pingback) as it seems dorky to me to comment on my own post. A pingback only adds the author and title of the post.

Both of these types are recipricol in that a link is exchanged. A comment isn't recipricol but helps generate additional interest in a post since people do seem to like to read them.

When I visit others blogs, I'm usually looking for something to do a trackback to in a near future post. If I find something interesting but doesn't really work into something I have in mind, I'll leave a comment.

[walrus]

Something I probably should mention that may have gotten forgotten is that wordpress, by default, adds the "nofollow" tag to trackbacks / pingbacks. You need the DOFOLLOW plugin to resolve this.