I don't get what all the congratulatory, high fivin' is about with regard to the new nofollow tag announced by Google (and previously leaked by Dave Winer -- note to self, don't share confidential info with him).

Nofollow helps keep spam links from being indexed, thus saving wasted space in the search world's valued meta-data silos. So what? It doesn't help me.

The only way I can keep spam out of my silo is to be responsible. That means active editing and policing of all input directed this way, be it comment spam, referrer spam, spam mail or cans of spam. With all of their vaunted heuristics I'm surprised the superheroes at Google couldn't figure out the difference between comments and content in the first place. Yes, that is sarcasm. As long as we allow anonymous commenting there will be flames and spam. Stop the anonymity and flames become spirited discussion while spam goes away. I had to do that at this site and I've solved comment spam. Why are we always looking to solve these problems with tags or technology? It's not like we've completely licked the problem of flames. If you want to flame me, go ahead and send me an email -- the trouble is I won't read much of it and it will never show up on these pages. You've lost your urge haven't you?

Update: Scoble admits that the nofollow tag is a great way for A-listers to game the page ranking system. Stuff it. I've 'rel="nofollow"ed' my links to Scoble and Winer in this post.