Jeff Atwood has a recent post on why he finally gave up and disabled Trackbacks on his blog. My blog is the tiniest fraction of his and I had to disable trackbacks just for sheer spam volume back in October (inspiring an anti-spam rant of my own).
Jeff lays the blame for Trackbacks' demise on Six Apart--the outfit that created the standard in 2002. Ah, those heady glory days when you still had to explain to people what a blog was. Trackbacks were a great idea. They still are a great idea. But Jeff is right, the simplicity of the standard...