As I was writing my previous post,  which was the bulk of a comment I made over on Larry Hollon’s blog (How New Media Are Changing Me | post from Perspectives),  it occurred to me that I miss what used to be a cool blog feature that I don’t see in use much anymore:  the trackback.  In many blogs,  it showed up down with the comments,  usually above them…because it was itself a form of comment:  a reference (a link) from one blog post to another.  My second blogging platform  (after Radio) was Movable Type,  which I chose in no small part because of this feature. 

Even more so now,  as Social Media has exploded and many people use a variety of services to communicate and reply,  we need some sort of standard that would enable diverging systems to know where comments came from,  what items they belong to,  and to what other systems they were sent,  so that the comment could then be sent to the same other systems.  That could help us eliminate seeing duplicate posts from people we follow on multiple systems,  and who also cross-post across services.