Trackbacks and the .NET blogger community

Earlier this week SiliconBeat lamented the seeming demise of one the key tools in the blogging community: Trackbacks. While I can entirely sympathize with the barrage of spam Trackbacks, I too have been forced into a position where by I, by default, do not permit Trackbacks to my postings.

The Washington Post seems to have found one way around this. Using Technorati they set up automatic listeners around the context of the articles they publish. This is a more de-coupled link that what Trackbacks provide, and it does appear to solve some of the problems. No word on how much manual intervention is required on the post to make sure the quality of links and related blog discussions is maintained.

So how to fix this problem ? The Trackback Chater, proposed my the founders of MovableType seem to be onto something. I'll be watching their progress closely.

The majority of my career has been spent fostering, growing and being an active participant in various aspects of the Java community. It remains a vibrant community and one can point to key organizations and website where Java developers virtually meet to share their ideas or vent their frustrations. The names like Oracle Technet, Java.Net, JavaLobby and TheServerSide.com have long been the go-to places.

Here at DataDirect Technologies, in addition to my other responsibilities, I've recently picked up our .NET product line and of course it is important to fully engage with the .NET developer community. I have at this point found the blogger community to be more scattered, but none the less equally talkative on many of the important topics that .NET developers tackle every day. This posting tracks back to a number of the key bloggers I have found so far, but I'm struck that it would be great to get the strongest and most knowledgeable voices into a more tightly knit community; or better still all physically in the same location?

So send me, or indeed track back with your thoughts on this. I'd be interested to know if perhaps a Java.NET equivalent for .NET exists already?