I resisted the urge to comment on the process of submitting trackback as an internet standard the other day because I didn’t want to just completely flame the idea. I knew there would be folks who would want to push pingback instead and I’m doubt that would be much better.
The biggest problem with both trackback and pingback is spam. Plain and simple, spam. Neither of them do enough to even put a dent in slowing down spam, let alone preventing it. Because of this I think that go through the effort to make a standard is pretty much a waste of time. Who wants to enshrine one more way for people to send spam as a standard? Want to do something helpful, come up with a completely new trackback/pingback/pick-a-new-name mechanism that is designed to actively slow down/prevent spam.
For background checkout trackback and pingback sites and specs. There is also a pingback vs trackback paper (via Matt).
UPDATE Thu 23 Feb 2006 @ 2:45pm: I should add that I like the general concept of trackback. I like the site to site (S2S?) interaction that it provides. More than once I’ve discovered a pointer to my site with additional feedback that didn’t show up in any of the blog search engines for several days (and sometimes never showed up at all). Keeping it decentralized means I don’t have to worry if Technorati isn’t responding to searches right now. I hope that Adam is right and that they do find a way to deal with the huge potential for abuse via spam.