Webmentions

Back in the heady days of the blogopshere, we had “pingbacks,” which were a way to write a blog post about someone else’s post, and have that second post be notified about your post.

These were effectively remote comments. Your reactionary post was a comment of sorts, and, true to that definition, blogging platforms would list pingbacks in the list of comments on a post.

Well, pingbacks live on, but now they’re called WebMentions, and there’s an evolving standards effort at IndieWeb. It’s in line with the goal of that organization to liberate us from proprietary platforms, including the social media networks that we’ve come to depend on for content marketing.

I like it. I’ll probably implement it on Gadgetopia at some point (though, with the demise of Gadgetopia comments, perhaps I’m symptomatic of the problem)