I’ve enjoyed the comments received on Conversational Blogging and the follow-up. See Jonathan’s post some excellent perspective.
Blogrolls are an awkward attempt at community-building. Gluing blogs together with RSS/aggregation/trackback and TopicMaps is helping build the community features in, while allowing complete control of each individual blog.
Having just got my trackback working this seems to be a key element to me. A greater element of control with improved likelihood that my postings will be seen by others. It’s also got a long way to go to get every blogger using it. Control rests with the user.
Should we favor blogs with trackback? We’re probably not there yet. There is a great trackback section here on the MT site.
Although TrackBack’s most prevalent use thus far has been as a form of remote commenting, a more exciting use has been emerging: using TrackBack to aggregate content into topic-based repositories. This was actually the original intended use of TrackBack–the remote commenting grew out of a special case of a topic-based repository, the “topic” being a single weblog post.