Trackback

Movable Type's TrackBack system allows peer-to-peer communication and conversations between weblogs. Imagine that you write about a movie you just saw in an entry on your Movable Type-powered weblog. Another MT weblogger reads your entry, and wants to write an entry referencing your original post. He could just comment on your weblog, but he'd like to keep the post in his own database and host it on his site.

Using TrackBack, the other weblogger can automatically send a ping to your weblog, indicating that he has written an entry referencing your original post. This accomplishes two things:

On your site, you can automatically list all sites that have referenced a particular post, allowing visitors to your site to read the response on the other user's weblog.

It provides a firm, explicit link between his entry and yours, as opposed to an implicit link (like a referrer log) that depends upon outside action (someone clicking on the link to your entry).