Scoble is taking a well earned break from dealing with blog trolls but he's appeared on channel9. Something that's bothered me for ages was finally answered, why Robert doesn't do trackbacks.

... trackbacks are seriously broken (they only show a small percentage of the people who actually link to a specific post)

Scoble bangs the drum for technorati et al as replacements. The same problem that trackbacks have, the small percentage, also applies to blog crawlers. Each of them requires an action on the part of the user or their blog publishing software; for trackbacks they must send a ping to the site they are linking to, for blog search engines they need to send a ping to the search engine.

Trackbacks offer the advantage that they are immediate; for example Alex Barnett linked to my article rebutting Mark's "marketers versus techies" page. As soon as Alex had submitted the post containing the link a trackback was sent to my page. It was processed, checked and published within a couple of seconds. I even got an email telling me it happened.

Compare this to technorati. A technorati search looking for links to the same page shows nothing. Now perhaps, eventually, technorati will get around to crawling alex's blog and eventually publishing that link in their search results but it isn't there yet. Why didn't alex's software ping technorati to tell them there was an update? Maybe it did, maybe it didn't, it doesn't matter. By scoble's logic technorati is broken because it doesn't show links. This isn't a new problem, at the start of the year I pointed out that Technorati never returned a link from scoble's own blog to mine. It still doesn't, 8 months later.

If you make the argument that you should ping technorati then that argument also applies to trackbacks, you should send those too. Trackbacks are lighter tool; depending on the number of links you have to ping of course. The number of blog search engines you ought to ping is getting larger by the month, I've seen lists containg over 50 services.

Trackbacks are not broken, they're just not widespread and by continually dismissing them and not supporting them you're painting a false picture. Me? I'd rather have something immediate than wait for technorati to catch up, if it ever does. So Robert please don't dismiss trackbacks, support them, help them, just as you help Technorati, bloglines, feedster et al.