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Best way to understand is with an example.
Imagine 2 weblogs, John's Blog and Mary's Blog.
1. John writes an article about all the benefits of dogs versus cats as house pets.
2. Mary is writing an article about all the horrible diseases cats carry. In her article, she mentions John's article promoting dogs, and she links to it.
3. When Mary publishes her article to her blog, her blogging software sends a "ping" to John's server, to let it know that she has made reference to John's article.
4. John's Trackback count, which is usually displayed below an entry, changes from "0" to "1". For example:
Posted by John at 3:43pm | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (1) | Permalink
5. When John's visitors click on his Trackback count, they will see a link back to Mary's article, along with a brief excerpt of it. So if John's readers are curious to see what Mary wrote about dogs, they can follow that link to her article on her blog.
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So, Trackback is a kind of weblog cross-referencing tool. It's purposes can be:
- To say to your readers "Hey look! Other people are writing about what I wrote!"
- To say to some other blogger "Hey look, I wrote something about what you wrote!"
- Some people think of Trackback as a way of leaving a comment on someone's blog entry, but leaving it on YOUR site rather than theirs. Likewise, many people consider receiving a Trackback the same as receiving a comment, and they choose to list comments and trackbacks together instead of separately.
Pingback is a variation on the theme.
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