How Trackback Works is not very helpful. I will attempt to explain (and hence understand) a little more clearly, starting from first principles. Briefly a weblog is a stream of textual entries. The main blog page collects those entries chronologically with a cutoff. However, sometimes people might want to tell a friend about a particular entry. That's what "permalinks" are for.
There is no way for a blogger to know who's sharing permalinks, they just see a bunch of hits.
What if you want someone to know you're writing about them? One way is to leave a comment with a link to your own article. In fact, its not clear to me why this doesn't solve the problem. Trackbacks are often displayed right along with comments! The only difference I can see is that the Trackback interface is presented to you by your own blog, whereas leaving a comment uses various blog interfaces. Ah, there is one very powerful reason to do it - it presents a good way for you to leverage your effort for both your own blog and help others. A comment only appears "there" whereas Trackback appears here and there. It serves to collect your "output" in one place (e.g. everything I write on the web is collected in my blog.)
Aren't we just recreating Usenet.
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