Ran into another interesting shortcoming of hash-bang URLs last night looking through my referrer log. Loads of referring URLs of http://gawker.com/ and http://kotaku.com/ to my blogpost. But no mention at all of my blog-post or a link to it on the homepage.

First I thought they were referrer log spamming, then it dawned on me that fragment identifiers get stripped out of HTTP referers, so making hash-bangs useless as a means of joining up distributed conversations on the web.

Somewhere on those two Gawker media sites there's a conversation going on about the use of hash-bangs. But nobody outside knows about it. It's a big black hole.