Tonight I've installed the trackback module on startplane. I think trackbacks have the potential to be an incredibly powerful tool for uniting people across the web. Unfortunately, I think they've fallen by the wayside for two main reasons. The first is the spam issue. By moderating and using spam filters I think this issue can be overcome. I would hope most bloggers who have stopped using linkbacks because of spam would reconsider now that the technology has improved. This begs the question that if the spam issue can been resolved, why aren't linkbacks more popular? This brings us to the second issue, which I believe revolves around the commercialization of the web. By enabling linkbacks, a blog is essentially sharing it's audience with other sites. Basic business principles would tell you not to freely give away your audience when they could be staying on your site and clicking ads.

My motivation for creating startplane is the idea of open and free communication, which is unfortunately being threatened these days. I look forward to using linkbacks on this site as a method of linking together like-minded (or unlike-minded) audiences in a distributed manner. Linkbacks are supported on all user blogs on startplane now, so if you find something on the web that you would like to comment on, I encourage you to register here and include a link to the article you are commenting on in your post. If the article supports the linkback api it will automatically submit a linkback to the mentioned site.