This is my open Trackback post for Tuesday, November 20th. I am cross-posting this to several different sites as well. I only normally do it from Shadowscope however I have been working so many hours this week and need something to post on the others 
The purpose of a linkfest is to help bloggers promote their work. The key technology used by linkfests is the trackback ping. The diagram below shows how it works. Each weekday, a new linkfest article is created on one or more of the participating blogs, and hosts sign up by either pinging the festival or using the form on the article’s main page. The host’s article is known as an open trackback post. The linkfest article keeps track of all the open trackback posts and tries as best it can to figure out each one’s trackback URL. The trackback URL is important because you ping this URL to get your article listed as part of the open trackback post.
To become a guest of the linkfest, you put links to all the hosts in one of your articles, then submit trackback pings to the hosts. This causes a link to your article to appear on the hosts’ blogs. The net result is everybody linking to everybody else.
