I'm not sure why there's so much consternation about the rel="nofollow" attribute, both in the comments on this blog and around the blogosphere. It's intuitively obvious to me that this is a good thing. Why? Because the choice of which URLs on this site that I think are worth linking to and worth indexing are now back under my control. That's a good thing. … I think in general if web results are going to be ranked on links among other factors, then they should be more "intentional." If this has the effect of pushing people back to their own blogs and out of my comments, I think that's great. And if it has the effect of wacking my page rank as well as others, so be it. I'd rather have a more purposefully ranked system, then watch it being gamed as it is now. Russell Beattie
Except if you're on TypePad it's not apparently possible for you to turn on indexing. Over at Anil's, Lou comments, 'I expect blog software companies to provide a way to manage comments to remove the nofollow attribute from a given poster's comments', and Adam says, 'I think I'd feel at least a little bit better about the no-follow tag if the blogger authors and typepad folks (Hi Anil!) made it *easy* for the blog owners to confer page rank upon comments on an individual basis, or at least automatically conferred page rank on authenticated comments'.
I'd always thought it a given that the power of the net lay in great part in our ability to build up a subtle web of cross-referencing and links — the kind of thing one does in talking and writing every day. Now, the clamp is down and conversation will be more difficult. I can't believe that most of us came into this in order to be driven back to our blogs and splendid isolation. Whatever this does for spam, it's certainly got me thinking that the web is heading towards greater separateness, a position reinforced when I read (thanks, Ian!) that 'in the not too distant future, more people will subscribe to topic/tag/remix feeds than feeds of actual people' (Read/Write Web). Well, I'd rather seek out the conversations, thank you, and leave the computer puttering away in the background, dribbling a modest number of topic/tag feeds whose purpose will be severely subordinated to the primary thing that matters to me in my life, the relationships I have with other people.
A while back, I came across a great remark about the invention of the margin. We must all have enjoyed those graffiti-like scribblings that lit up our hours spent studying in libraries. Comments are not entirely dissimilar to margins, sharing something of the margin's capacity for opening up new lines of thought and suggesting new avenues for investigation. I want a world where we can connect to each other through comments/margins, linking (sometimes, yes) to our own posts if we think we have something worth adding to the debate and it's silly to try to repeat ourselves all over again in what should be the smaller space of a note, comment or jotting. I can't improve on how John Battelle has put this (see my previous post), and I believe he's right, the effect of the rel="nofollow" initiative will be to 'discourage active and intelligent dialog on a post'. In fact, I think this has already started — for psychological reasons: I am not so pushy or impressed by myself as to want to flog you my blog by ceaselessly (and meaninglessly) linking to it, but when I read some of the disparaging comments flying around now about bloggers who ever dare to link to their own postings in comments then I feel great reluctance to go down that road at all. And yet, this (linking) is what we do all the time in conversation ("Yeah, I had just that conversation the other day with X — she said … and I said …"), in academic life, in our work places … We're sociable and social animals and we need to retain the ability to function fully like this in comments on each other's sites. I'm entirely happy for the owner of the site to exercise control (we do, don't we? I excise comment spam the moment it appears and ban the source from further commenting), but if we take the route proposed then talking to the web will come to feel even more like talking to a wall than it does for most of us already.
(How ironic to be in this position when those of us who joined the game relatively recently thought we were following good practice in developing the art of commenting — as advocated by, inter alia and for example, Robert Scoble and Brian Bailey.)
I am also bothered that my own blogging company, as celebrated on Anil's blog, seems more impressed by its technical skills and performance than it has been concerned with consulting its customer base:
I'm also incredibly impressed with our Six Apart team. We didn't just announce, we shipped, on multiple platforms in multiple countries, in an incredibly short period of time. That's just awesome to watch, because I think our strength as a blogging company is in having the resources to pull that off, while our strength in not being one of the behemoths like the search companies is that we can be nimble enough to just ship. Kick ass.
Great to feel triumph (justified, too!) that you've handled the technical, executive and managerial issues so well, but what did your customers want? Did you ask them? And are you listening now? Six Apart's/TypePad's strength as a blogging company cannot be said to reside in having the resources to pull this off.
