in his great Ftrain.com: The Mechanical End.

If you were going to compile a historical list of the top 10 examples of writing that is native to the web, Ftrain.com would certainly be somewhere near the top of the list. What other sites would be on the list?

The blogger’s blogger: an interview with Beth of The Cassandra Pages. A wonderful portrait of a master of the weblog form.

Trackback is dead. Are Comments dead too?. It’s funny – I read this the other day and largely agreed with Tom – I turned trackbacks off long ago. At the same time, I know of at least one implementation of trackback – YULBlog, by Patrick Tanguay, that is very useful and easy to use. But then I read a post that Patrick wrote (the day before Tom’s post, incidentally) about problems that have crept in to that implementation as well – which led someone (who wasn’t really clear on the whole concept of tb) to “leave” YULBlog.

The problem with trackback, though, is also its strength. I can think of wonderful implementations of the trackback concept that take things like a blogroll, contacts/friends from Flickr, and other such data as a sort of whitelist that would indicate to a publishing system that a particular trackback ping does in fact come from a qualified individual. But trackbacks from people that a blogger already reads – and has to some extent publicly announced that he/she reads or knows – is a pretty thin concept. I get a much bigger kick out of knowing that someone I don’t already know has enjoyed a post enough to link to it. So it’s a seemingly insurmountable problem – trackback could be workable within a smaller, self-identified community – but that’s also the kind of environment in which it’s less useful, and in fact could serve to heighten the “echo-chamber” effect that does seem to affect the weblog space to some extent.