If Fred blogs about something interesting and i feel compelled to write an article about it i can formally represent the connection between the articles using trackback. Likewise if fred reads something on my site and blogs about it. This is useful because it means you can quickly check sources and check for yourself what the blogger is talking about.

To do this we instruct our blog software to send the other software a message. We tell the other software to which page its related and a little bit of the content that relates to it. This information is then sent to the trackback address where it is received , checked and recorded in a database.

To send trackbacks for an article on this blog use the address linked by the [T]. This will be the trackback URL you should associate with your article in your blog software .

For this blog it will be something like http://blog.amias.org.uk/trackback/5 , where 5 is the article id (i.e http://blog.amias.org.uk/articles/5). Any trackbacks received are displayed along side user comments with a clickable link to the source site.