Dans la forêt du charme et de l'enchantement

Tyler Cowan wonders whether blog comments will survive. Will another form of conversation replace them? He thinks not, but some time ago Technorati’s Dave Sifry predicted

conversations on the Internet would eventually all revolve around every individual having a blog, each individual posting her own thoughts on her own blog, and blogs cross-linking through mechanisms like trackbacks and blog search engines

Contrary to what Tyler implies, this model should allow for the same reading experience, with comments listed below the original post, even if the commentary comes from posts on other blogs.

Tagging is not necessary, as I understand it. Trackbacks (aka pingbacks or linkbacks) make it work.

Unfortunately, trackbacks don’t seem to have taken off, whether due to the technical problems of handling them or due to spamming.

I was going to add this as a comment on Tyler’s site, but will post it here instead as an experiment.

If anyone reading Tyler’s site ever reaches this post, I would appreciate a one-word comment, to prove that trackbacks, linkbacks or similar mechanisms work.