I fully agree with Sebastian who wrote in "On Blogs, Portals and Conference Websites" about something which I would count to the category "semantic web". Sebastian says, it would be a good idea for (e.g.) portal websites to implement trackback APIs. The benefit for you is to be able to comment on a story of that portal in your own weblog.
But I even see more benefit in that. The usual structure of the web is unidirectional, which means, that a klick onto a link is in most cases a one-way-road. Sure, you can hit back to revisit the last website, but there's no connection from a link target to the link source. The trackback technology implements links in a bidirectional way, if someone publishes a link, another link to his entry is provided at the link target.
I think there are many more application areas for trackbacking. Imagine a shop that implements it for it's products. If someone writes a realted article, this is directly available as a kind of "review". Imagine a product website of a manufaturer, where automatically reviews, tipps and anything imaginable around the product is linked.
In general, I like the idea to have trackbacks more distributed in the web. The idea of bidirectional linking is cool.