the well-known author of several interesting books, has started a weblog: Shovelware. Definitely something to check out. Dery has always had a lot to say. I haven’t always agreed with him, but his blog definitely raises the bar a little bit.

site, I also found this: Fix Your Titles for Better Search and Use. It makes eminent sense, and I have now changed all of my titles as he suggests. One thing to watch for is that when I didn’t have my name in my titles, Google had a far harder time finding my posts in a search on my name – that’s why I added “Michael Boyle’s weblog” to my titles about 18 months ago. We’ll see if this re-ordering has any impact, though I doubt it will.

that something is lost on the web when some links are in essence devalued compared to others. In his article in Searchblog, Follow On No Follow: Will “Fully web-expressed writing” Suffer? he suggests that commenting itself will suffer in a nofollow world, in that commenters will be less motivated to engage in, as he puts it, “fully web-expressed writing.”

I think he has a point, but then again it’s hard to say. There are a ton of assumptions flying around about blog comments and their value, the motivations of commenters, the motivations of comment spammers, the relative value of links in body text vs links in comments, etc. But very few of the assumptions have been checked and validated in any way. I like that there are opinions on this, and strong opinions. The trouble is, everyone’s opinions are based on slightly different assumptions – and no one can support those assumptions.

Let no fellow nofollow, lest we all lie fallow. A cogent article on the rel=nofollow initiative from Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent. I diverge from him, however, in that my understanding that the goals of this initiative are not to prevent comment spam directly, but to contribute, in a small way, to reducing the potential value comment spam. I agree that the assumption that comment spammers do it because of page rank is dubious and the evidence to support the assumption is lacking.

Preventing comment spam on the Google Blog.