Remember when I wrote in this space about JournURL, a neat service that combined Weblogs and discussion forums into a new kind of online conversation space? In that piece, I described the service as “a visionary idea and a pretty impressive implementation”, but knocked it for being self-contained: to participate, you had to use JournURL to host your blog, which was fine for newbies but not so fine for those of us who already have a blog.

Well, fasten your seatbelts, because JournURL just solved that problem. Roger Benningfield, the brains behind JournURL, apparently took my words to heart and came up with a pretty elegant solution. JournURL now leverages the TrackBack standard pioneered by SixApart to provide what Benningfield calls ping2talk. Ping2talk is simplicity itself — just create a JournURL account, and you’ll be provided with a TrackBack URL. Then, when you create a new entry on your blog outside JournURL, just have your blog software send a TrackBack ping to that magic URL and your entry will automagically be included inline in your personal JournURL space. Since TrackBack is available for most popular blog packages these days, this opens JournURL to easy interoperation with a whole world of personal publishing packages.

Pretty cool! From reading his post, it sounds like my comments here on AEV may have been part of what motivated Roger to develop this — it’s a great feeling to help someone take a good idea and make it even better.