Improve Linkback Presentation

The current default presentation for linkbacks(pingbacks and trackbacks) does not encourage their use. Currently,the presentation looks something like this:

[…] A pingback example. […]

People have complained that the utility of linkbacks has been overshadowed by their use as a vector for DDOS attacks and spam.

The recent improvements to Press This show we can do better in presentation of linked content.

The pingback specification is a bit vague in terms of presentation suggestions, stating: "Bob's blog also retrieves other data required from the content of Alice's new post, such as the page title, an extract of the page content surrounding the link to Bob's post, any attributes indicating which language the page is in, and so forth."

I am proposing by default we switch to a default with improved readability and more consistent with the user experience on other websites.

For example, a basic linkback should display the author/site name, the name of the linked content, etc, rather than the summary, and that information stored as comment meta. This would look more like a citation.

That display could be (optionally) progressively enhanced by other factors, for example, page markup such as MicroFormats, Microdata, or OpenGraph(popularized by Facebook), etc to add a better experience if the linked site supports it.

The basic point is that linkbacks are unusable by people in their current form, but the idea of letting people know you linked to their content is a good one. It encourages conversation and interaction. I think we just need to make it a better experience. Otherwise, everyone just turns it off.

I'm aware the above could be done by a plugin(and may start as a 'feature' plugin), however I think the basic structure of this change belongs in core.