My First Trackback

I received my first-ever trackback this month, just after a conversation with UnwiredBen where we discussed shutting off trackbacks on our various sites since all they did was attract spam.

For those of you who have better things to do with your time than learn all these terms, a trackback is an electronic note to my blog that someone else wrote about one of my blog posts. The trackback I received is from the blog post Blawg Review #56: Sex, Virtual Weddings, and Baseball, to my post about the McDonald's lawsuit.

It starts like this:

It's been a busy week in the legal blogosphere. We're a committed group blog here at Point of Law, so we teamed up to cover the many topics summarized below.

And here is the bit about me:

Joe DiMaggio went on in life to become Mr. Coffee. And speaking of coffee (wait for it) could the blogosphere possibly go a week without mentioning the McDonald's coffee lawsuit? Nope: "Flooded Lizard Kingdom" falls for the trial lawyer hype and repeats all sorts of tales about the lawsuit that Overlawyered exposed as urban legends long ago.

I'm not sure how to feel about this.

First, I'm not part of the legal blogosphere. I guess I open myself up to being reviewed by anyone anywhere if they write about a topic that I mentioned, but including Flooded Lizard Kingdom in a "blawg" (blog about the law) review is like...well, something that doesn't fit. Do they routinely include non-legal blogs?

Second, what's the deal with putting "Flooded Lizard Kingdom" in quotes as if it's my alias? My alias is The Princess, and feel free to put that in quotes if you like. I have definitely seen people use blog names as people names, but this felt somewhat like a swipe.

Third, my sincerest apologies for contributing to the over-discussion of this lawsuit in the blogosphere. I had seen it mentioned only once ever, many months ago. Indeed, the post I used to spark my post was so old that I felt I had to invent a lame-ass contrived reference to my trip to Sonic to justify it.

Fourth, I should not have taken a page on the American Trial Lawyers of America website as gospel. But my first thought was that I can't take a site called Overlawyered seriously as a reliable source. Then I thought, hey, would I take a site called Health Care For Everyone seriously as a source of data about health care? If so, then why reject Overlawyered? Then I thought, hey, actually, I wouldn't take the HCFE site at face value either, because I've seen too many nonprofit and advocacy organizations on "my side" use data in a remarkably sloppy fashion! So I will say this: Overlawyered does a good job of linking to various pieces of evidence. I've clicked through to quite a few of the links and read articles, and now I'd have to say that I'm not sure about the case. I'm sure I've learned some kind of lesson from all this.

Fifth, their blog has no comments allowed, only trackbacks. You can't talk in their space, you can only tell them you talked about them in your space. Never seen that before.

But finally, I never thought I'd see the day when my words were referenced in a publication of the Manhattan Institute and American Enterprise Institute. It's a strange, strange world.