No new protocol necessary: An

No new protocol necessary: An interesting new take on the technology that tracks referrers and trackbacks and pings, Mark Pilgrim has flipped the coin around so that instead of having everyone pinging everyone else to see who's talking about what, any site can now take a look at all the other sites that are linking to it and extract the paragraph of text around the link to their site automatically.

This is cool (from a technology perspective) for many reasons. People implementing this will have instant results, since it doesn't require a critical mass of referrers to have installed the software. More importantly than that, however, is that it puts the emphasis back on the conversation, where it should've always been in the first place. Finally, it's easier to "get", which is one of the primary obstacles in TrackBack's road to fame and fortune.