Nofollow is Leadership

Wow.  Now here is a case of cooperation over competition. Six Apart, Google, Yahoo, MSN, WordPress, Userland and others worked together to support the nofollow tag to reduce the value of comment spamming.

Reminds me of Anti-links and VoteLinks, an interesting affordance.  You could use Nofollow to link to someone you disagree with and not have it contribute to their PageRank. 

UPDATE: Scoble makes a similar point to anti-links.  Sunir, who is actively involved in fighting wiki spam, raises some really significant issues.  Pete suggests VoteLinks to negatively rate spammers may be more effective. 

Best thing about cooperation is that it can be built upon.  Good thing too, as curbing link spam will take many iterations in practice and this is a change in the structure of the web itself.

Comments

[Scott Rafer]

You can also use it in a group blogging situation to make sure no one's points before yours are indexed... and many, many other similar abuses.
ScottR

[Sean]

Yes! I am with you on this, seems like a very positive step.