Trackback dead? Depends on how you publish, I say.
I just read an interesting article about how blog trackbacks are dead, and I have to say that although I see where the writer is coming from, I have to conditionally disagree with what he’s saying.
It’s true that many blogs’ trackback mechanisms get slammed continuously with spam, and so do many blogs’ comment mechanisms, but overall I think that it’s not so much trackbacks/comments that are on their last leg, but perhaps certain publishing platforms.
A year or so ago, this blog was published using Movable Type 2.661. I had hardly any readers or traffic, but I was cleaning up copious amounts of comment spam on a regular basis. I installed MTBlacklist which seemed to help, but didn’t make the problem go away.
Now, this blog runs on TextPattern. I have quite a bit of traffic thanks to MXNA, and yet, no comment spam! I also had no problems with BoastMachine, but didn’t really care for the interface as much.