Tagbacks?

Shelley Powers came up with an interesting idea to employ Technorati tags as a sort of replacement for Trackback.

I have to confess I'm a little behind on the tagging phenomenon; I can sense that it seems to have a lot of potential for many uses, but I haven't thoroughly thought it through. (And how's that for a lot of th-s and gh-s?)

I'll participate and give this little proof-of-concept experiment a try here. Shelley assigns this topic a tagback-tag of "bbintroducingtagback". I guess I have two initial observations. The first is that if people spread the same discussion topic out over a bunch of different tags, it would be difficult to keep track of the conversation. But that was somewhat beyond the scope of Trackback anyway, and this might work better. The second is that this system could impose costs on Technorati, but it could also just make Technorati even more useful. Shelley points out that Technorati can tune the system to avoid spam:

Since Technorati scarfs up delicious tags and flickr tags, all of these items will eventually appear in my Tagback page, along with weblog posts where people have linked to the tag directly in the post. And if Technorati excludes googlebots and other bots in the tags pages, there is not impetus for spammers to spam this page. As long as Technorati excludes pagerank from these pages. Hint. Hint.