Are trackbacks worth it?

Trackback has always bothered me as a solution. Why would I have to ping your site to tell you I’m linking to you, when search engines can easily tell you who is linking to your site? When I look at the trackbacks I get, almost all of them are spam. And even when trackbacks are working as intended, the excerpts include tend to be irrelevant, so you still have to click through to find out what’s going on in this conversation.

What’s your experience? Are trackbacks helping or are they just a dated technology made obsolete by Technorati, memeorandum and their ilk? If you were to implement a new lean blog engine, would you include trackback support?