Lars-Christian.com|This is me at the intarwebs.

Just a quick note, I was finally able to snatch a Pownce account last night, and with it I got a few invites to share as well, if anyone would like an account and has yet to get a hold of an invite. If you don’t know what Pownce is, some have said it’s like Twitter, only on steriods, and fronted by web-celeb Kevin Rose. To be honest, I’m not sure myself as I haven’t had a lot of time to test it out, but I will soon enough, and will probably do a post on it as well.

Anyways, if you want an invite, just leave a comment (be sure to sign the comment with your actual email) and I will send one your way. Expect a more full fledged post later tonight.

A while back I wrote a post arguing the case against nofollow, and why it has no place in the comments of a blog, just because everyone has the possibility to contribute and have their own links listed. I wasn’t the first to raise my voice against it, and now it turns out I certainly wasn’t the last either. Andy Beard was the one that showed me the solution to this, and also one of the first to argue the case, and since other prominent bloggers like Dawud Miracle and Randa Clay have joined in on the discussion.

Randa even got the great idea of creating a badge that proud bloggers against the nofollow on comments can use to show their stance in the matter. I thought this was a nice idea, and worth a mention. Just as a small favour to all of the people who have jumped on the I Follow train already, I am going to share some link-love with them all!

• Wendy Piersall of eMoms at Home
• David Airey of Creative Design
• Ben Yoskovitz of Instigator Blog
• Chris Cree of SuccessCREEations
• Char of Essential Keystroke
• Chris Garrett of chrisg.com
• David Paul Robinson of davidpaulrobinson.com
• Char also of Casual Keystrokes
• Michelle of Scribbit
• Ponn Sabra of Empower Women Now
• Jason of Webomatica
• Robert Hruzek of Middle Zone Musings
• Mario of mariosalexandrou.com
• Lisa Mills of Work at Home Revolution
• Aaron Potts of Today is That Day
• Heather of Home Ec 101
• Laura Spencer of Writing Thoughts
• Kirk of JustThinkin
• Gayla of MomGadget
• Alister Cameron- Blogologist
• Karen of The Pond
• Jonathan Phillips of SmartWealthyRich
• Susan of Life Is Risky
• Vin of Dummies Guide to Blogger
• René of ProBlogger World

Do you want to join the movement of bloggers that appreciate and reward people that comment on their blogs? Be smart, remove the nofollow tag!

Did you ever hear that expression “the times are a-changing”? It’s actually a Bob Dylan song, I think, but that’s besides the point. Because they are, a-changing, and fast too! I joined Facebook quite a while back, I think it’s almost been a year or so. Except for the fact that it looks pretty, it wasn’t of much value to me though, since hardly anyone in Norway used it, and I’m not too keen on using sites like these as a venue for getting to know new people, since I have much better ways of doing that online. As an example, I can mention that when I first signed up about 35 people of about 4000 or so from my University where signed up. When I logged in a few days back though, I had around 10 new friend requests, all from people I know!

Facebook is spreading like fire here in Norway, and I it seems that it might just take off for real. I couldn’t be happier about it! I used to participate in a similar Norwegian social network last year, but it became too much of a dating site for my taste, and in the end I just deleted my profile. But Facebook, I think it can be an extremely useful tool, especially for keeping in touch with old contacts, and that’s what I personally want from a site like this.

After using it a bit more extensively, I can say that I absolutely love Facebook. From a user perspective, it is one of the most amazing websites I have ever actively used. Everything is extremely intuitive, and the design is just amazing. I never thought that a design that at first glance appears to be a bit boring, can end up as one of my favourites of all time. The small AJAX/JavaScript tools are extremely handy, and working through the site is a dream compared to other, similar sites like MySpace, which I truly loathe for the same reasons why I love Facebook.

I’ll keep you all updated on my experiences with Facebook, but so far I have nothing negative to say about it. Oh and if you wish, feel free to check out my profile, and poke or send me a friend request.

Let me start again by apologizing for not posting new posts. I’ve more or less spent every available minute this week working on Bloggst, and it’s really paying off, but I’ll get back to that in my next post. This time I thought I’d take a look at one of those new, cool up and coming web projects, and I chose Crispyblogposts. And before you ask, no, this isn’t a paid review.

As their about page says, Crispyblogposts is a social bookmarking site strictly for blogs. Translated that means that it’s like Digg, but for blogs. I love this idea, as any chance for bloggers to gain deserved recognition is good. Unfortunately there are some small drawbacks, which I will get to soon.

I’ll start with the positives however. As I stated, I love the idea, so they definitely get an A for effort. The design is also beautiful, and you’ll get a good view of the site and how it works after spending about a minute there. The idea of using channels (that can be created by users) is also a good one, and ranking each channel by popularity on the frontpage is pretty cool. I would imagine that with some popularity however, there would be a wealth of bogus channels created, so they might have some management work on their hands there.

If you venture into the most popular channel called Blogging, you should right now see that an article I wrote over at Bloggst is actually quite near the top, with 13 points! I’ll share a small secret however, I gave myself three of those points. One at home, one at my girlfriends and one at University. How did I do that? Well you see, CPB right now allows everyone to vote for articles without any registration required. I am not sure whether or not this is going to change when they come out of beta, but I sure hope so. It is all too easy to cheat the system when it is only based on cookies and IPs, and registration is a must for sites like these.

Another drawback is that despite that one of my articles is “extremely popular” in the most popular channel, I have yet to see any significant traffic from CPB. Despite the 13 votes for the article, I am seeing less than three readers from the site, which means that currently it’s not worth the effort for bloggers to submit and share their content through the site. A site like this is completely dependant on user participation, and without it, it’s more or less worthless. Someone has to be around and help it get the ball rolling though, and as soon as they require registration to vote, count me in!

All in all I would say that Crispyblogposts has potential to fill a void in the blogging scene as a user driven democratic source for the best and most useful blog articles. They do however have a long way to go before they can claim that spot however, and it will require a lot of work and some serious promotion. It’s a one-man project however, and I find that alone extremely impressive, and I wish the guy in charge good luck with Crispyblogposts in the future!

First a little history lesson. The “nofollow” is a tag that can be added by anyone webmaster to certain hyperlinks, and it will tell search engines that they shouldn’t visit that particular link. The practice was actually introduced by the mother of all search engines (okay, that’s not true, but it sure looks like it these days) which we know as Google. In light of recent revelations, I have decided that today is the day that I say enough is enough, and that the experiment with the “nofollow” tag was an honest attempt to achieve something good, but it is now time we realize that it has failed. What are these revelations which spurred this post, you might ask? Well, when I think about it, they aren’t all that recent, but they need to be addressed still!

Today it is common for most blogging platforms to include the nofollow tag in all signature links. In theory this isn’t a bad move, because the intentions of stopping comment spam are noble and in theory it should benefit bloggers. The only problem is that it does neither. Comment spam is as big of a thing as it ever was, but fortunately for us bloggers useful tools like for instance Akismet and Spam Karma have been developed, and they both individually or better yet, in collaboration do a great job filtering out trash comments.

Have you guessed yet who’s taking the heat from the nofollow tag? Of course, it’s those honest commenters who are hard at work with their own blog, that has their link to their own blog ignored by search engines. We as bloggers who use the nofollow tag are indirectly saying that comments are worth nothing to us, and that we are incapable of filtering out comments that add nothing to the conversation ourselves. There is of course the fact that human readers will see links in the comments, but in the future perhaps we can find a tag that stops them from seeing them as well? Oh wait, I think.. well never mind. My point stands that if someone comments on my blog, they deserve the “reward” of search engines reading their signature links, which is why I will soon strip out the nofollow tags from comments-links here on my blog.

Blogs aren’t the only online sites that make use of the nofollow tag however. It has also come to my attention that the good folks over at the internet monstrosity Wikipedia have decided that the nofollow tag is added to each and every external link throughout the site, in an attempt to reduce link-spam. Again we see honest intentions coming in the way of common interest. By doing this, Wikipedia is effectively saying that “OK, this is great and valuable information, we’ll pay you half of what it’s actually worth to use it on our site”. I am appalled by this move that Wikipedia has made. It says that the links to their sources are worth nothing, and if you look at the signals it sends it the fact that it demotes the value of the sources far outweighs the benefits of discouraging link-spam.

Like I said before, the nofollow tag was invented and introduce by Google themselves. What strikes me is the fact that even though blogging software developers have managed to develop systems that seperates spam (which shouldn’t be rewarded) from useful comments (which definately deserves the reward of search engines crawling their links), but Google haven’t and need us to tell them apart for the search engine? Sounds fishy, but we still have the power in our hands at least, and now it is time that we use those powers vested in us by the state of Google to declare death over the nofollow tag.

Update: Thanks to Andy in the comments and his list, I am now certifiably nofollow free! Be sure to check that list out to find your preferred solution for how to get rid of the nofollow tag.