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The short answer: trackbacks are like automatic comments.

The slightly longer answer: Most blogging applications have a way to send notices (pings) to any website URLs you reference in a blog post. If you write about a specific blog post you read, for example, you can “ping” that post, and your blogging software will leave, in a similar format to a comment, an excerpt of your post and the URL back to your post.

This is good because it helps keep track of the conversations about topics as they swirl around the blogosphere, and it notifies the blogger that you’ve written about his or her post. That will prompt at least one visit to your site, so the blogger can check you out.

You might see trackbacks sprinkled among regular comments (usually preceded by ellipses (…)) or you might see them in a special section after the post.

There’s more to it than that, and there are, as always, pluses and minuses to trackbacks, although the pluses outweigh the minuses in my book. And there are always slight complications.

But this is just the short and the slightly longer (but not as long as I could be once I get wound up) answer, and that’s enough for a start.

I’ll post the long answer on Monday.