Got a new toy

I just finished installing a new toy for this blog. It's a Trackback system by HaloScan.

Some people might be tempted to ask “What the heck is it?” And the easiest way out for me, is to show you this FAQ from HaloScan.

But then, some of you might ask further, “Why do you even need to have it?”

The easy answer that I usually get, is that by having Trackback, the blog author can check the popularity of his/her own post. Indeed, this is correct, but I feel it's more than that. And the following's my take on this.

Often, when one blog has a really cool post that excites readers, that post is very likely to be quoted on in some other blogs. This is expected, and there's nothing strange about it.

But consider the following scenario: suppose a person B writes on his blog about a post of a person A. Then, the implication of this is that the readers of B's blog will come to know both B's blog and A's blog.

Still following me? Then, let's suppose further that there is another person C, who also writes about either A's post or B's post. By doing so, the blog network expands, and the readers of C's blog will come to know all A's blog, B's blog, and C's blog... You get the idea.

So, from the above scenario, you can see that the further away you are from the original post, the bigger blog network you can perceive. And that's good for all of us bloggers, since this means that you're more likely to meet new friends, who are very likely to have similar interests as you (after all, they're interested in the same post as you).

But looking back at the original blog author, it looks pretty bad. His/her “Blogosphere” is still as tiny as before, and there's no way for him/her to expand his/her blog network. Talking in data structure term, this is like a singly-linked list, where each node has a pointer back to its parent node.

Visualizing it this way, you should start feeling sorry for the root node by now, since it doesn't have a pointer that points to any of its children (or grandchildren, or great grandchildren, etc.). The root node is all lonely and sad. :~

But, by having a trackback, it's more like each child (or grandchild, etc.) is pinging back to the root node. So now the root node has pointers to other nodes, and its perceived blog network is increasing every time one more blog refers to it.

As such, the root node isn't lonely anymore, and they lived happily ever after.


And thus, the moral of this story is, “Get your own Trackback now, before your blog becomes a lonely, old-gramp, root node in a singly-linked list!” :-P