[toyg]

> Something I never read on any site.

I feel sorry for you - the original early-'00 blogosphere was actually very good, with all sorts of people building connections and intelligent debate through comments. After a while, the conversation was so deep that comments ended up being too short, so they had to define Pingbacks so that people could post elsewhere while still connecting with the source material.

And then spammers and the political sphere co-opted the technology, and it all went downhill.

I think there is still space, for defensively-minded geeks, to create ways to communicate that can keep debate open while shutting down the trolls. It's clear we don't have such a thing at the moment. I fear, however, that well-intentioned researchers like OP will simply end up building new systems that will replicate the mistakes of somewhat-naive early pioneers.

[superflyguy]

I remember those blogs. Somewhere between Usenet and Facebook. I found the ping back things annoying. If I remember rightly it was four or five pages of a copy of the first line of the article plus a link to someone else's blog but with no reason given for why I'd want to roll my sleeves up and start clicking on them.

[toyg]

Pingbacks were a 0.1 implementation of a concept that never got a second chance, because then the walled gardens arrived and destroyed the ecosystem. The main problems they had were what you mention: each ping would contain only a few lines (which i think was a limit in the standard, to limit spamming) and the automation mechanism was a bit stupid (every reblogging ended up generating a superfluous ping). People who cared could fix the first issue (with a sort of "above the fold" summary), but the second was enabled by over-eager engines and ended up ruining it for everyone.