-Customers On Fire- The Co-Creative Business Show

Let me blow your mind for a second and you can think of the blogosphere as kind of like a brain, posts are like brain cells, trackbacks are like synapses, and the “memes” that run through it are first like ideas, and secondly like memories.

Although trackbacks aren’t the end all and be all of blog linking (blogrolls have a lot to answer to) they are the one thing that makes the blogosphere more spherical. They always struck me as the most overlooked aspect of what makes blogs work, and what makes the blogosphere, spherical. In fact I just went to wikipedia which has got a nice little article about the blogoshphere with no mention of trackback, just links (worth visiting for the other terms like blogistan, and blogtopia, which of course miss the point that it’s spherical).

Trackback essentially makes your posts, or articles “aware” of when other bloggers talk about them on their blogs, and creates an automatic reciprocal link between the posts. This is an incredibly useful concept when you think about the “transmission” and storage of ideas, a few posts linked together form a thread of an idea, a hard coded path in the blogosphere.

These hard coded paths that end up forming a somewhat permanent record of an idea in the blogosphere. They capture the narrative, the idea building and spreading. I kind of liken it to when lightning strikes in the desert and leaves a glass replica of itself in fused sand.

The linking between blogs, is, and continues to be the engine that drives their growth in relevance on the internet. Search engines love links, and blogs are a great mechanism for creating and cultivating connections with other sites.

On a side note around the whole idea of “micromarketing”, i’m pleased to say that even though this blog is only two months old it is already in the front page of results on google when you do a search for micromarketing. This may be in part to “micromarketing” being a bit of a niche term, but what they hey, i’m glad to be there.