Pingback on blogspot? Of course not!

Pingback is probably one of the greatest things for blogging since…..well…..blogging itself.

If you don’t know what pingback is, check out this well written article: What are Trackbacks and Pingbacks at WordPress?

Anyways, we just implemented the XML-RPC pingback protocol in PHP for Sazze because we’re allowing users to link to their relevant blog articles when they write reviews (see it in action).

In order to share the love, we ask that our users, in turn, place a link to their Sazze review on their blog.  However, with pingback we can make the link exchange automatic and that is win-win for everyone.  We promote our users’ blog articles on Sazze and we get a pingback link in their blog article’s comments.

Unfortunately, it seems that blogspot does not support the pingback protocol.  Instead they have a proprietary system called “linkbacks”.

Basically, blogspot searches blogs and includes them in its “blog search” index.  If your blog happens to be included in that search index, then blogspot will detect your links to their hosted blogs when it updates its index, and include a “linkback” link to your article on the blogspot blog that you referenced.

For everyone else whose blog is not indexed by blogspot, you’re out of luck.  No “linkbacks” for you.

Personally, I think this really sucks!  Blogspot is one of the larger blog hosting sites, and the fact that they don’t support one of the best open standards for inter-blog communication and article sharing is just disgusting.

I blame Google’s influence.  They like to pretend that they aren’t like Microsoft, but to them, their way is always the right/only way.  Hmmmm………sounds like Microsoft, no?