Richard Giles

I’ve upgraded to Movable Type 2.21 to allow me to use TrackBack.

TrackBack is a feature that allows Bloggers to see who is linking to particular posts. Why is that important? Well, it allows everyone to see links that are relevant to one another. So if anyone else using TrackBack links to this post, you’ll see it in the TrackBack link at the bottom. If the topic is important enough, there eventually will be many posts on many Blogs linking to each other. This allows ease of navigation, because it reduces the need for doing searches. All the links are there for browsers to see and follow.

Some (and I’m sure not all) potential repercussions for this in the future, if other Blog tools implement the feature, will be :

1. A tighter knit community in the Blogosphere.
2. Quicker propagation of news.
3. Abilities to see the flow of information through mapping TrackBack posts.

This type of feature could truly revolutionise Journalism. Steve Outing in his article Board The Weblog Bandwagon Now, Please, recommends that the newspaper industry take Weblogs seriously and begin to use them. Now imagine, if they also add TrackBack to their news articles that they currently write on their news web sites. They would expand their community, and even gain some free jounalists who are willing to write Blog entries expanding on their article.

I’d like to see business take this a step further. It occurred to me the other day just how powerful the Internet could be to a business if it knew how to use it well. I believe that 99% of big business have no idea how they can seriously reach their customers via the Internet. Most are still stuck in the mid-nineties, publishing web sites like they are brochures or catalogues. Amazon has taken the next step with their review feature on items.

My suggestion is that corporations should employee an Internet Community Developer, for want of a better name. This person would be responsible for growing an online community of customers. That doesn’t mean sell products or services to the customers, but get in touch with them, learn from them. At the same time an expert in the field could increase the companies exposure, hopefully for the better, for free.

A fantastic way to start such an endeavor is create a company Blog. Turn on the Comments and LinkBack features, employ some of my techniques in my Attracting Traffic To You Weblog (Increasing Blog Hits) post, and start communicating. Done right, people searching on the Net for information on the company, or more importantly the product or service, or ways to complain, etc. would find the Blog.