First inklings stir of the Shape of TB to Come ... I have a process now, not perfect, takes a while to anneal to stable but it's working, secure, accountable and quasi-reliable, where I can get that instant gratifying feedback that we bloggers so enjoy, and have a CC on the ego massage arrive via cellphone.

Nothin' quite compares to looking up from the tiny screen and telling the next person in the cash-out line, "I've just been blogged."

yeah, right, ok bud. can you move it? your teller's waiting ...

Technically pretty simple to do, but operationally there's some puzzles left to solve, learning left to happen and some new habits to hone.

• the cosmos discovery is patchy and sporatic; this morning I received notifications for citations made months ago, only just discovered. This tells me the coverage is more complete than I'd expected, but also tells me the alerts may not be precisely real-time
• not sure if it's good or bad, but I can't (yet) directly share these citations with you. This may be a Good Thing because
  1. you don't get bothered with useless or repetitive repetitive repetitive TB pings as were so common back in MT MT MT days. If someone rebuilds their pages or repings my page, I'll get the phone alert, but otherwise no harm done
  2. fewer false positives would mean the TB count per article might actually mean something.
• for now, the process to promote these pings to published is manual, so the TB is automatically gated.

That latter point is probably the inescapable future for all TB; it's maybe acceptable collateral damage to have the spam trackbacks flood the author (up to a point of a few dozen a day maybe) but unacceptable to have that same level of damage auto-promoted to public view, and as we see with the easy defeat of the Bayesians by simple random anecdote-prose noise, there's no robot filter that's going to do the task.

The parallel from the Real World is probably like those, egad, three full freakin' pages? of one-liner critical reviews pumping the pre-intro of William Gibson's new book (can you say 'media whore'?) -- anyone can and will say anything they like, even irrelevent or self-serving like a link-spamming, and the author/publisher will, by this new method I've got going now, get a clipping of each and every one, but it's only a raw material, a pool from which to draw what we will.

So if a trackback is good (or delectably bad) we might lift the lanyard and let it pass, and hold off our approval stamps for anything remotely spammish. Unlike the robotic as it was honesty of the auto-trackback, it is true this new gated and edited version is deliberately and selectively re-inforcing our own statement, like Gibson's publishers, in the service of our making that rhetorical 'sale' and you're right to lament that loss of stark reality -- for those rightfully suspect of any blog-author's trackback pruning impartiality, I suppose there will always be a Technorati or Bloglines to show up the full gory list ... although no doubt, as the scourge of TB spam overtakes them, even these sites will grow to be as selectively deliberate as we're seeing on the TopicExchange, but presumably, being apart from any vested interest in the discussions, we'd hope they'll be less biased to the actual politics of whatever it is being discussed in the cross-blog thread.