Currently, the blogosphere is unable to defend itself against the onslaught of trackback spam. One of the most useful and under-utilized aspects of blogging is increasingly being disabled across the blogging landscape as popular blogs succumb to an avalanche of automated trackback links meant to boost someone else’s page/blog rank.

Several interesting things are happening behind the scenes that should provide some remedial therapy for the blogosphere in this area, but for now, several sites are stepping in to provide informal trackback functions to blogreaders. Memeorandum has become a nexus for blog readers of late not just because it keeps a “hot list” of current memes floating around the blogosphere, but because it is as close to a trackback function as we’re likely to get for now. For example, Tim O’Reilly has had to turn off trackbacks to his blog. Clearly, this week, his What is Web 2.0  post is generating a lot of discussion in the community. Before the ascendancy of trackback spam, a popular post like this would also become a “wiki” of sorts – a self assembling index of references to related posts and links.  O’Reilly’s post has a good long set of interesting comments by now, but how does one quickly find out who else has been blogging about this post? Memeorandum does the job for now.

An obvious shortcoming here is that while Memeorandum does provide a quick index to who’s talking about what in the blogosphere, it can only practically address the hottest subjects and the biggest names in a limited slice of the ecosystem. Memeorandum, for example has two “sweet spots”: technology and news. Those are fairly broad categories, but you’re out of luck if your interests lie outside the scope of Memeorandum and similar services (like, say, string theory, for example), or even if the topic in question never quite makes it “supernova” on the meme charts. 

Real trackbacks are self-asserted links, and thus susceptible to being abused.  Memeorandum is (among other things) a form of mediated trackback system: They provide a cloud of “trackbacks” to related content for their hot topics. If real trackbacks are destined to be disabled indefinitely – if trust and authentication frameworks do not emerge to insulate the trackback feature from abuse – then eventually, I expect that mediated trackbacks – a compiled list of related links provided by a trusted third party – will become a significant opportunity for serving the blogosphere. To be really useful, a mediated trackback service would provide broad analysis of content links in the ecosystem, not just the hottest several dozen from the tech and news categories.