(http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1738&ncid=738&e=11&u=/zd/20040625/tc_zd/130244 by way of elearnspace)
OK, there’s a lot that’s interesting here, but what really caught my eye was the bit about trackbacks:
Six Apart last month introduced a new pricing model for Movable Type, a move sure to draw some negative reaction, Trott said. But Six Apart decided to use trackback when sharing its pricing news through the company’s blog because it provides more pertinent feedback than a blog comment section or customer e-mails, Trott said.
“If we had had open comments then it would have been a thousand times worse because it would breed anonymity,” Trott said. “The accountability of Weblogs is that they are your online personality.”
Six Apart recorded between 800 to 900 trackbacks from its original posting about the pricing changes and another 300 to 400 when it asked for more feedback in a later blog posting, Trott said. Bloggers often wrote essaylike responses and provided insight that helped shape a revamped pricing structure for Movable Type announced last week, she said.
This fascinates me. I have an article draft buried somewhere on my hard drive that explores the differences between what I consider to be the best UI features of a discussion board and the modern weblog, how these change the shape of the conversations, and how to design a hybrid system that guides the moderator on how to set up the UI based on the desired characteristics of the conversation. But I must admit that I’m still trying to wrap my head around the full implications of the whole trackback thing.
If anybody has insight into this topic, please ping me with your trackback or, if you don’t have a trackback-enabled weblog, email me.
Michael Feldstein is the founder of e-Literate who currently works as the Senior Program Manager for MindTap at Cengage Learning. For more information, see his profile page.
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