I have always liked how the blogosphere is like a huge distributed network. All on different domains, using different technologies, and yet somehow we are all connected. How do I know if someone is reading this? What if someone references my writing? Well, there are quite a few ways to know:
- View the logs. I can see who visits my site from where, and get a good idea of what is being read and why. Google Analytics makes this easy to see. But there is not a good way to share that with others.
- Get someone else to do it. Referer.org does this but I don't really want to hand all my visitor info over to them. Sites like google would probably drown out the smaller, more interesting sites (like other blogs).
- Do nothing. As soon as I post, pinging-services and spiders will spread my post all over the interwebs along with everyone else's. So if I want to know what other blogs are linking to this, I can just visit an indexing site like technorati to find out.
- Linkback via trackbacks or pingbacks - blogs tell each other directly when they are linked.
Linkbacks sound ideal on paper: I link to you and you link to me, everyone wins and google-juice flows aplenty. The problem is that not everyone uses them and spammers use them more than anyone. So rather than dealing with that mess, I'll just link to my blog entry at technorati or use the API to pull the linkers from the cosmos. Blog-indexers are notified by Ping-o-Matic or Feedburner (which also provides me with RSS subscriber stats). The end result is that I don't have to worry about trusting those who link to me, but we still can know about each other.
