In reading a blog of a David weinberger talk (linked by AKMA in his blog of the same talk),  I saw a comment at the bottom of the page, posted by David himself on that blog.  Another item in the differences between Comments and Trackbacks (besides the fact that Comments are made on the server of the blogs being commented upon,  and Trackbacks are made on the “commentor’s” blog…thus creating a kind of “distributed conversation”) is that Comments posted by a reader are often more personally directed to the receiver of the comment.  Trackbacks are intended to speak to the wider audience (even though the comment is known to be “for the public as well”,  it is usually written with more of a “one-on-one” feel).  Before Trackback,  or on blogs without access to or use of this feature,  the comment will more often take the form of a public , many-to-many style with an eye to perhaps inviting more comments.

Funny how I’m writing this (originally) in Radio,  where this feature is not available (to my knowledge).  I installed Movable Type and migrated most of my stuff over (still a few kinks to iron out,  like some links to longer articles which had used Radio shortcuts for links — titles of articles in quotes that Radio translated into a href tags with links as the page was constructed and uploaded),  and I installed it mostly out of the desire to use the Trackback feature.  I have been copying posts from Radio into MT usually daily.  I guess I’ll put this one over after I copy yesterday’s into MT.