Charon QC has just moved his blog to a new home on WordPress. He asks me what is this mysterious thing called atrackback? To I quote from the currentWikipedia article:

TrackBack is a mechanism for communication between blogs: if a blogger writes a new entry commenting on, or referring to, an entry found at another blog, and both blogging tools support the TrackBack protocol, then the commenting blogger can notify the other blog with a “TrackBack ping“; the receiving blog will typically display summaries of, and links to, all the commenting entries below the original entry. This allows for conversations spanning several blogs that readers can easily follow.

… Some blogging tools are able to discover these TrackBack URLs automatically, others require the commenting blogger to enter them manually.

Now this all sounds like geeky stuff, andof course the technical understandingis, butin practice what it means is this: I link here with my blogging tool (WordPress) to his first post;his blogging tool (WordPress) will automatically discover this link and post it to his admin “dashboard” and also to the comments section of that post. So he and his fans get to know I commented, and the conversation expands.