November 24, 2004, 3.27pm • 254 comments » • 6,287 Views

Stories begin to acknowledge the discussions they spark

Here’s one more example of news publishers opening up to the We Media web - CNET’s News.com has started using Trackback.

For anyone who knows what a Trackback is (it took me a while to get my head around it), this is startling.

Commonly used on weblogs and invented by blog system supremos Six Apart, Trackback is a way for Web Page A (usually a blog) to tell Web Page B, “Hey, I’m talking about you over here!” Then, Web Page B can add to itself a link back to the discussion over on Web Page A, creating a virtuous circle of lovely, linked conversation across the web.

News.com’s adoption of this feature means a major news publisher is opening up its news stories to the thousands of discussions they spark off all around the net, signalling another move from the you-read-it-and-shut-up model of news distribution to something more akin to you-read-it-then-dissect-it.

Unlike most weblogs open to Trackbacks, News.com won’t publish snippets of reaction to its stories on the story page itself, but on a different page. Excerpts of comments posted by geeks to their own blogs about the technology news run by News.com are then included on the San Francisco- and New York-based site, together with a gracious link back to the weblogs.

For example, just by linking to this story about e-voting, News.com should, in theory, summarise the post you’re reading right now on their page and link back to it. Except I’m not at all sure my own Trackback functionality is working properly. It will be interesting geekily fascinating to see how they cope with potential abuses from afar.

What’s the point in this? Well, it contextualises the story for the reader, giving it a life of its own beyond the copy editor’s final button-press. CNET’s product development guy John Roberts pointed to the announcement, in which his team says the aim is to “help readers follow the flow of interactive content. Anyone linking to a CNET News.com story who sends the proper notification will get a link back in return.”

*Sigh* Now i’m all geeked out. Why is it always about blogs?

By way of getting Trackback-happy, Hypergene offers some opinions on this move, saying:

• It gives editors a comfortable distance between what they publish and what the community is saying.

This is somethiing I was thinking about earlier. It really does draw a distinction between on-site and off-site community. Concerned about the legal ramifications of hosting a discussion forum attached to a story on your site? Take the discussion off your site.

• It shows that you’re site is sincerely interested in not just doing all the talking but listening, too.
• It’s a smart way provide a better experience for your readership while making you a better citizen of the web.