It really does depend for me on the content of the trackback. I tend to skip most of them but occasionally there is one that looks relevant.

The problem really is that trackbacks do a really bad job of presenting the person’s opinion . This may be because most people don’t summarise their thoughts in an excerpt, as you can on WordPress, and so inevitably the trackback just says “i just read this post here and…” instead of “I disagree with author because…”.

Perhaps it would be beneficial for blogging platforms to allow the writer to change the content of each trackback, if they wanted, so that trackbacks could genuinely form part of the conversation.

What I mean Ronald is that the user who creates the trackback by writing a blog post should have more control at send time; for example, here is a trackback from Robert Scoble’s blog a few days ago:

[…] The entrepreneurial neighborhood of Palo Alto […]

That tells us nothing about the content of the post. Had the writer been able to specify 1. whether it should even be a trackback (many links shouldn’t) and 2. What this particular trackback should say (For example, I really don’t agree with Robert’s assessment of the situation because…) then this would not only add something to the conversation, but also it would be clear that the person was actually engaging in it in the first place and not just linking to point others to the post.