One of the nicer features of blogging platforms is their ability to
monitor who has linked to an article of yours. This is performed
through a “trackback ping,” where an XML-RPC ping command is sent to a site as part of the posting process. In the case of Campsite, it would be interesting for reporters and editors to monitor which
articles on their Campsite-powered site are being linked to by
bloggers or Trackback-compliant CMSes. The Movable Type blogging
server was the first to implement TrackBack?, and they have a good
explanation at http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/beginners/. The
page also includes links to protocol documentation and usage
scenarios.