Links provide balance

Fred disagreed with what was written about 4 services on Techcrunch and VentureBeat, he provided some data to back that up, and clear disclosure.

Techcrunch responded, defending their writers, again fair enough.

Fred Wilson followed up with another post, linking through to the differing opinion, thus giving them equal limelight

Mathew Ingram was following the story closely, and as a professional journalist who I know links out to conflicting opinion on a frequent basis, followed up with “Bloggers Need To Try Harder”

Michael Arrington also linked through to Mathew from his post to give some additional balance.

The only negative in all this is that Fred ends up with a reputation management potential problem with a post headline on Techcrunch “Fred Wilson – Hypocritical, Wrong and Conflicted” – probably a bit uncalled for considering how this all eventually worked out.

Sadly This Isn’t Typical

I am going to start with a few choice quotes from Michael Arrington

In reference to Matt Marshall’s Like.com post on VentureBeat

that’s because he’s an old MSM, and sometimes still worries about “balanced” stories. I don’t aim for balance, I just want to be right.
Michael Arrington

Controversy in blogging pays

Joe – we’ve found that the “hits” – the blog posts that generate a lot of discussion – are the ones that drive all stats, including, indirectly, monetization. The problem is knowing what’s a hit and what isn’t before it actually happens. Given that we are all rushing into new territory, I think a little leeway is appropriate.
Michael Arrington

Some key points

• There is a financial incentive to be controversial
• There is equally a financial incentive for a story to remain controversial – linking to a differing opinion in an update? (extremely rare) or new post that links through to a strongly differing opinion (almost unheard of)

It is my belief as a blogger, the stronger opinion you have on a topic, or the more conflicts you have, the more you should try to highlight differing opinion.

One of the safety nets for a blogger are pingbacks or trackbacks – if you display them, and moderate them without concern for conflicting opinion.

Maybe it is a technical problem with Akismet, that pingbacks and trackbacks on Techcrunch rarely appear from valid blogs.
Maybe Techcrunch aren’t overly concerned with recovering pingbacks and trackbacks from the Akismet sin bin, but I have noticed trackbacks and pingbacks rarely appear on Techcrunch.
I would certainly hope that opinions the Techcrunch editors don’t agree with are in a worse case scenario just being deleted, and not actively flagged as being spam.

Techcrunch Has Pingback Code

The following code is included in each page

<link rel="pingback" href="http://www.techcrunch.com/xmlrpc.php" />

That means there is no need to include a Trackback link if you are using WordPress and sending ping notifications

So why are so few trackbacks appearing on Techcrunch, especially from what I would look on as trusted commentators such as Mathew Ingram?

Akismet relies on collective intelligence, you have to take an active role in removing legitimate trackbacks that have been wrongly detected as spam, otherwise you can silence the voice of other bloggers, not just on your own blog, but on other blogs as well.
Even if you subsequently intend to delete a pingback or trackback, you should still remove it from the spam list.

Why are people having to leave comments to say they have responded in some way to a Techcrunch post?

Cut The Ropes On Your Safety Net

Trackbacks and Pingbacks on a blog are your safety net, allowing others to find differences in opinion.

They are especially important on sites which have a very fast paced editorial process, and a reduced amount of time to followup on commentary elsewhere. I certainly wouldn’t expect Techcrunch to link through to every conflicting blog post, that would be an extreme burden on resources better spent chasing down the next great startup – I even think they are over generous placing trackbacks above the comment area.

However if Techcrunch is to provide strong opinions on various topics, which have significant influence on the opinions of their 600k+ subscribers, and where they have admitted that controversial content has a financial benefit, they should ensure pingbacks and trackbacks are appearing, if only for some level of oversight.

Unfortunately in this regard Fred’s blog has also lost a few points – he has now replaced his comment system with Disqus.

Whilst that shows comments, he no longer has those comments hosted as part of his blog, they are on a separate domain, and the process of adding Discus comments has also removed the ability to display trackbacks.

Hyde Park Corner or a Conversation?

A blog without functioning pingbacks, trackbacks and comments is a bit like shouting your head off on Hyde Park corner. Whilst there is the potential of some limited 2 way conversation, your audience loses a lot of perspective.

Update

Tony Hung’s take on this is a worthwhile read, and I do practice what I preach. Is it all just about controversy?

Engage your community. Don’t be afraid to get physical (in a metaphorical kind of way), and call people out. Don’t afraid to be negative. But be prepared to fight for your opinion.

Install Greasemonkey

Lots of people might have it already and I know 65% of my readers use Firefox. If you don’t have it already, it is extremely useful, and there are thousands of user scripts for it.

Install Blogger Trackback

After you have Greasemonkey installed, install the appropriate script – the developer says both can co-exist, but I haven’t tested that.

If you are using New Blogger, you can use this trackback script for greasemonkey.

If you are using old blogger, there is an older script available

Trackback In Blogger

I think the picture near enough says it all

Yes that is a box within the Blogger interface where you just add a trackback URL.

After you publish, you even get a nice confirmation that it was sent

Del.icio.us

The script also pops up a window for your Delicious details, and tags your posts.

Pingoat & Pingomatic

Yep, it is meant to work with Pingoat and Pingomatic as well, though when I tested with Pingoat following the instructions, I didn’t see any additional visual confirmation. I didn’t test Pingomatic.

I am not 100% sure this part worked for me, I need to do some more testing

Good But No Banana… yet!

It isn’t a perfect solution as is, because it is using the blog name for the link URL on the receiving end, rather than the blog post title.
It should be possible to hack the Greasemonkey script to use your post title, so that it uses the post title for links on the receiving end.

I will see what I can do to get a modified version made available

In this first part of this quick series, I am going to cover Haloscan.

Create A Haloscan Account

First of all you need to register with Haloscan.

You do not need to integrate Haloscan with your blog to use their trackback system

I would actually currently advise you not to integrate Haloscan for comments and trackback display on your blog for a number of reasons.

• Blogger can now display linkbacks
• You can remove nofollow from the trackback links on blogger
• It is harder to migrate to WordPress or other blogging platform if all your comments are in Haloscan.

Send Trackback With Haloscan

It is important that links actually exist, and in this particular case when this post is published a link will exist, otherwise comment spam plugins might intercept the trackback.

There is also what I would look on as a bug with Haloscan, they use the blog title as the link for the trackback, and not the post name. The blog post title appears in bold above the trackback. Knowing this you can make sure you have some keywords for a good link by including them in the blog title rather than the post title, though the text entry field is quite small.

This is how a trackback appears on my blog below the comments box.

So if you are using Blogger, or a blogging platform that doesn’t seem to send trackbacks correctly, Haloscan is one option you can use to send a trackback.

I was just reading Paul’s post on trackbacks as there seems to me some kind of meme floating around started by Steve Rubel that trackbacks are dead.

I smell FUD, because that probably ties in with the “Social Media Press Release” that is being promoted by Edelman as a solution for press releases (PR Web support trackbacks)

Trackbacks are very much alive for blogging platforms such as WordPress that actually pingback automatically without having to copy and paste some silly code that is supposedly to reduce the amount of trackback spam.

Trackbacks happen less on such blogging platforms – I have heard recently that Typepad only seems to be working to trackback other Typepad blogs – that is just sad.

Blogging without trackbacks is insular blogging

Anyway Paul mentioned receiving…

1000 Spams Per Day

Here are my stats for Spam Karma which I wrote about the other day

* Total Spam Caught: 9800 (average karma: -1056.58)
* Total Comments Approved: 1029 (average karma: 9.94)
* Total Comments Moderated: 419
* Current Version: 2.3 rc1

That is over 5 months

• I started this blog Oct 17th 2006
• I have been running DoFollow to remove nofollow from trackbacks and comments from the day I launched.
• I have been running Spam Karma since day one
• This blog is higher traffic (at least by Alexa)
• I have more toolbar pagerank
• I cover slightly different topics, but there is a lot of overlap

Paul’s domain is older by a fair amount but that doesn’t explain

15 times as much spam

What do you think?