Chris Taylor regularly makes sense of new technologies for his many readers. He recently left Time magazine for Business 2.0 where he’ll head up their Futures department, but not before writing an excellent article on RSS and its potential for streamlining our daily reading habits. We wish him the best in his new endeavor.

v. Mainstream media. To make journalistic content available to other media outlets for simultaneous publication. A fee is often associated with the transaction. Blogging. To make XML-format content available to individual subscribers. Syndicated blog content may contain a headline, datestamp, and excerpt or full text of an entry. Subscribers collect and read the resulting newsfeeds in news readers or aggregators. Syndicated content is sometimes republished on other blogs. Blog syndication is almost always free.

Citizen journalists wishing to sharpen their interviewing skills would do well to read Dan Gillmor’s interview tips in a series of comments on his Bayosphere blog. I’ll be posting some of the tricks I’ve learned over the years, but Dan’s advice is solid, relevant, and blog-friendly. Good interviewing is an art and, as Gillmor points out, there is no single technique. Still, no matter whether you’re planning to interview your grandfather, the mayor, or the graffiti artist down the block, it pays to learn from the best. The one trick I’ll add here is: Silence can be an interviewer’s best friend. Some of the most telling comments from interviewees have come in the wake of a slightly awkward pause in the conversation.

A portmanteau for permanent and link. n. A unique URL for each blog entry allowing others to link directly to the entry even after it is has been moved from the blog’s front page to archives or categorical files.

The phenomenon of folksonomy, the bottom-up categorization of content that lies at the heart of social bookmarking site del,icio.us and photo sharing site Flickr is catching on all across the web. Earlier this year, blog search giant Technorati began tracking user-generated tags and their tag page offers a constantly evolving topography of the categories of greatest current interest to participants. The ease-of-use and self-correcting nature of folksonomies underlie the success of the phenomenon, but inevitably debates arise. Today, Peter Merholz responds to an earlier article by Clay Shirky. Both authors see value in user-generated metadata, but Peter takes Clay to task for an ideological bias, claiming Shirky denigrates classic hierarchical organization schemes in favor of folksonomy. Peter argues for an integrated approach. Reading both articles goes a long way toward helping the rest of us make sense of this new and fascinating territory.

Milverton Wallace takes the long view. Founder of the annual NetMedia conference, Europe’s most prestigious gathering for Internet-savvy journalists and media managers, Wallace sees digital communications as the “Agora of the 21st Century.”

“Like it or not,” Milverton writes on the FreeSideEurope site, “this is the new cultural landscape for learning, entertainment, and communicating with each other. And it is being constructed without consultation with, or permission from, regulatory authorities or self-appointed gatekeepers.” Milverton traces the history of literacy, pointing out that the Greek democracies of the 5th century BCE were made up of largely illiterate individuals. By the Industrial Age, education had become a “job requirement.” Today, he argues, a knowledge of “hypermedia’ is an imperative. He makes a compelling argument.

Well, in that single second, one new blog launched. Or so writes David Sifry, founder of blog search engine Technorati. That’s more than 80,000 new blogs a day. No wonder it’s so hard to keep up.

Some doubt Technorati’s claims that these numbers exclude spam blogs, but few question the fact that the overall number of blogs is doubling every five or six months. If the trend holds steady, that would mean 20 million blogs by the end of the year.

Patents were first written into law to protect inventors. As far back as 1474, the city state of Venice decreed that individuals could register their inventions to protect against infringement. Today most governments provide some form of patent protection, but increasingly there is disgruntlement about the breadth of some of the patents being granted. Most aren’t as spurious as an actual patent for a sealed crustless sandwich, but news yesterday that Google had filed an application for “embedding advertisements in syndicated content” raised a few hackles. Dennis Kennedy over at the Corante site and Chad Dickerson at InfoWorld both note that they had written about the possibility of embedding ads in RSS feeds long before Google’s 2003 filing. This will be an interesting case to watch.

n. A blog feature that allows visitors to notify you and your readers that they’ve responded to your blog entry on their own blog. Introduced by Six Apart in 2002, a trackback link consists of a unique trackback URL and a mechanism that allows one blog to ping another, providing notification of the cross-linking.

(from Chapter 8, Packing Your Toolkit)

Trackback is a little tricky to explain, but the feature is handy and worth taking a moment to understand. In a nutshell, a trackback link beneath a blog entry is similar to a permalink, but with a trick up its sleeve: It allows individuals to notify you and your readers that they’ve responded to your entry on their own blogs.

The main reason bloggers sometimes choose to respond on their own blogs rather than simply posting a comment beneath your entry is that they want their own blog visitors to read what they’ve written and perhaps contribute to the conversation. Also, bloggers have more control over the text on their own sites and can correct typos or otherwise edit content after posting.

In theory, the ability to carry on a conversation across blogs is compelling. In practice, trackback can be a bit daunting. It’s likely that the mechanisms will soon be transparent, but for now, stepping through a manual trackback scenario is probably the best way to illustrate how trackback works.

Aunt Magda Masters Trackback
Let’s say your Aunt Magda really likes your latest blog entry about frog butter and would like to share it with her own readers. On her blog, she starts a new entry, telling her friends why she thinks they’ll like what you posted, along with a short excerpt from your blog. Because she’d like her readers to be able to click a link in the body of her entry to go to your blog and read your full text, she clicks the permalink beneath your entry. A window opens with a web address that remains unique to your original frog butter entry, even after it’s archived. Martha copies the permalink address and pastes it into the anchor tag for the link in her own entry. So far, so good. Her readers can now happily read her commentary and the short excerpt from your site, and then, if they like, click the link to read the full text on your blog.

But you and your readers still don’t know that Aunt Magda started a side conversation about frog butter on her blog, so she next clicks the trackback link under the entry on your blog. A window opens displaying a brand new Web address, the unique trackback address for the entry. Magda pastes this trackback address into a special trackback field in her own blog. The field may be called something cryptic like “Trackback an URL” (in WordPress) or “URLs to Ping” (in Movable Type). In addition to pasting the unique trackback address, Magda probably also types in a headline, copies an excerpt from the new entry on her own blog, adds the permalink for her entry, and finally clicks to post.

Now everyone refreshes their browsers, and on your blog, you see that in the parentheses after the trackback link for your frog butter entry, the zero has updated to the number one. If you click on the trackback link, the window that opens now includes her headline and excerpt, along with a live link to her blog. (On some blogs, trackback content appears automatically with any comments on the entry’s permalink page.) Subsequent trackback links by other bloggers who comment remotely will update the trackback number on your blog and so you always know how many other sites are discussing a specific entry on their blogs.

More Trackback Goodness (and Badness)
A conversation is now taking place across blogs thanks to trackback. Not only that, your search ranking has been enhanced since Magda’s blog software probably pinged the major search and aggregation sites and their ranking algorithms will reward you for Magda’s trackback link.

What’s the bad news? What else? Spam. Like battling the spam that plagues email itself, it is a constant game of whack-a-mole. There are anti-spam plugins for all the major blog applications, but it is likely that you will sometimes have to go in and manually remove spam links when particularly virulent specimens make it past your safeguards.

OK, there’s one more bad thing. Because only the blognoscenti understand trackback, not that many people use it yet. But as automation and standard practices improve, this ability to converse across blogs promises to be among the most powerful features in blogging.

Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald once wrote, “You can’t make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you’re doing is recording it.” In today’s column, he provides a series of “fill-in-the-blank” news scenarios for the would-be citizen journalist. Among the possibilities: “Sen. __ __ said it would not be forthcoming, because when Sen. __ __ said, “__ __,” he refused to say he was sorry.” I, for one, am glad Art’s still around.