2005-12-19

Web dictionary? Topic aggregator? Trackback spammer?

This is weird. It superficially seems to be a publish ping triggered peek-back system which tracks posts containing some or a few of the words it covers, and upon finding them, sends track-back pings to the post, one trackback for every covered word found. Does this read trackback spam to you, or is it a usefulm but perhaps misconfigured service? I'm leaning toward the former, but I'm not sure how fully automated or intended-permanent the setup is yet.

I received two trackbacks for yesterday's post, one for "javascript", one for "calendar", both words just present in page content, neither tagged. The site seems to be running a software called PukiWiki, and judging by the published site statistics the site has just started to get up to speed the past few days. I'd be leaning towards this being a potentially useful service, perhaps especially to the Japanese crowd it seems to target (pages seem to be written in Japanese encoded as EUC-JP but incorrectly marked-up as ISO-8859-1, so you may have to employ manual browser overrides to see the content properly) -- but if it's going to transmit trackback pings to autogenerated index pages, it's spam, useful or not.

I hold a firm belief about trackback notification being a tool reserved for notifying about human commentary. Breaking that is littering the blog world, and I believe this breaks that convention, quite severely.
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