Over on Daring Fireball, John Gruber has a lengthy entry on why he doesn't particularly like, or want to use, trackback. In place of trackback, he's chosen to add a list of recent referrers, which he says provides comparable information, without the barrier to entry (essentially, a trackback-enabled CMS) of trackback. I think he's wrong. Gruber's argument that the referrer approach is better because Trackback is too hard baffles me, as well, given the complexity he describes in his referrer tracking system. Is trackback as harder than, say, building a snowman? Sure. Is it harder than writing HTML by hand? I would say no, having spent a great deal of time during the past ten years teaching people to do just that. It's a _whole_ lot easier to point them to TypePad, or Radio, or any of a number of other Trackback-enabled tools and say "just turn on autodiscovery" than it is to teach them how to embed a dynamically-generated referrer list on their site. But more importantly, while referrer information is similar to trackback, there are some extremely significant differences between the two. Right now, for example, the referrer list for the entry of his that I linked to above has 477 entries, and the only information provided about any of those sites is their URL. Immediately, you can see the problems. First of all, the "right now" that I had to preface the last line with. If you check the page a month from now, the list will be very different. It's showing "recent referrers," not all referrers, and the information is therefore ephemeral. Second, the information provided is much too sketchy to really be useful to me as a reader; I don't know the author, the title, or the content of the referring page. And perhaps most importantly, I have no idea if the "referring page" really has _any_ relevance at all to the original site or post, or even contains a link to it. The beauty of trackback, and the reason that many have embraced it, is the way that it creates what Shelley Powers has called "sticky strands" among sites. In her discussion of why she uses Trackback rather than culling her referrer logs, she wrote: The point of Trackback isn't really to help me, the author of a post. As John points out, there are lots of tools out there for that. I can check my referrer logs, I can check my Technorati Cosmos, etc. The point of Trackback is to help my _readers_ to see new directions that conversations on my blog have taken. I think a referrer list is a poor tool for that purpose. (BTW, I found John's entry because Clay linked to it in his del.icio.us bookmarks. I continue to be mightily impressed by that site's versatility.)