The Problem With and the Future Of Mentions

My involvement with the Indiewebcamp movement continues, and I want to encourage what is possible.

One of the building blocks of Indiewebcamp is the webmention.

Webmention is considered an update to pingback. Pingback was proposed in 2002 as an automated version of the Trackback concept that added link verification. The basic principle of  a Pingback is Person A posts something. Person B posts something that links to Person A’s post, which sends a pingback. Person A confirms by visiting Person B’s site to check the link exists. The pingback specification uses the XML-RPC framework as a method of transport.

Akismet, a hosted anti-spam service, has taken the measure of blocking all of them by default, because they’ve become such an avenue for spammers. We certainly think Trackback support should be discontinued, and Pingback likely behind it. It isn’t just that they’ve become an avenue for spammers…but they add no value.

Webmention is similar to the pingback specification in use, but it is carried over plain HTTP as opposed to XMLRPC. This means it is easier to implement, and a simple HTML form can send webmentions.

Most pingbacks and tracks contain title of the post that sent the trackback and ellipsed […] … […] summary text, which is of little use. No improvement of presentation is likely to go forward without addressing the underlying protocol.

The proof of concept of this is the WordPress webmention plugin, which adds support for webmentions, and its companion plugin, Semantic Linkbacks, which takes the output of any sort of linkback and turns it into human readable text, along with a profile picture. It allows for a much nicer presentation.

The way Semantic Linkbacks does human readable text is that it parses the site that has sent the mention. It counts on the site being microformats 2 complaint, although it will try to fall back on the original microformats standard and other information if needed.

I’ve thus filed a feature request with the people at WordPress, the start of my attempt to make WordPress more friendly. It is specifically for Microformats 2 support in WordPress, which would allow better parsing of WordPress sites.

With this, more sites will display markup that will allow sites receiving mentions from them to better present those mentions. Part of the reason mentions are mostly garbage is we have made them that way with neglect.

I’d like to not only see Webmentions baked into more sites, but improved presentation tools and discussion around them, and then…the Spam problem will be one worth solving. There are efforts underway to address this.