For awhile, the TrackBack was a popular tool that let one blogger let another know they are linking to them. Further, it let bloggers embed snippets of posts on the posts they mentioned. CNET even for awhile adopted the technology on all of their stories. No more. Yahoo even tested it too. Finally, Six Apart submitted it as a standard a few months back.
These days, however, the TrackBack feels irrelevant. Sebastian Kiel agrees with me. So does Jeff Harrell. It's been replaced by little widgets that have the same effect. You'll notice that all of my posts have a chicklet that show the number of links and diggs. This is powered by Feedburner.
However, there's more here. I think blogging has matured as a medium. We're not as obsessed with blogging or Technorati rankings as much as we used to be. Take a look at charts below. The number of mentions of the word blogs is largely flat the last six months. The universe has expanded. We have YouTube, Twitter, social networks and on and on. Blogging continues and is strong but it's part of something bigger. That's a big change.
Get your own chart!
