What it the difference between Pingback and Trackback?

Question

What is the difference between the two names? Thanks.

Answer 1

The pingback automatically finds URI’s in the post and pings them while a trackback needs to have a URI entered manually.

See this Whitepaper: Pingback vs Trackback

Answer 2

Both Trackback and Pingback allow you to notify other URLs (webpages) that you linked to them from your page (e.g. a blog post).

The difference between both are:

• Trackback uses a simple HTTP POST request to notify the other side, while Pingback uses XML-RPC.
• Trackback support on the remote site has to be discovered by parsing the HTML source for some commented RDF, while the Pingback URL is sent as HTTP header.
• By using the HTTP header, pingbacks are possible for files other than HTML, e.g. images and videos.
• The Trackback specification leaves many things undefined, while the Pingback spec is very clear.
• The pingback specification requires pingback receivers to check if the original URL contains a link to them. This is not necessary for trackbacks.

What the others said about "automatic": This has nothing to do with both specs. It's your blogging software that (automatically or not) sends requests to the remote servers for any links in your blog post.