Bye-bye, comment spam?

It's recently been announced that Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search have teamed up with the developers of several popular blogging programs (including my own WordPress) to fight comment spam in blogs. Comment spam, of course, is basically spam that gets posted as comments to blog entries, thus making life harder for readers (who have to pick out real comments from junk) and better for the spammers (who now have another link to their site, which increases their ranking in the search engines). And you as reader will see no difference between links that have it and those that don't (unless you're a Firefox user and you change your UserContent.css file to display nofollow links differently than regular ones).

But, as I say, the big boys of search and blogs have teamed up to support a way not of blocking comment spam per se, but rather, making the spammers' attempts to win the search engine rankings game futile. This new solution, which they all will begin supporting as soon as possible, is simply an attribute placed in an anchor tag (a link). The blogging program developers will have their programs screen links in comments and add rel="nofollow" to the code that makes the link work. As the search engines crawl web pages, they will ignore the links that have rel="nofollow". That way, the link doesn't count toward the URL's search engine ranking.

And of course, this doesn't have to be used in just blogs. If you've ever had a guestbook, you know that spam can be a problem too. And there are probably other uses for nofollow that I can't think of at the moment. But I wonder how the spammers will work around this one. They always find a way. Surely no one's going to actually click on their links when reading comments in blogs, so they're going to have to review their battle plan. Whatever they come up with, it's going to be very clever.

For the record, here's what I do to prevent comment spam: I screen comments before they're posted. Comment spam isn't an issue for me at this point, but it may become one in the future, so I want to be prepared.

Here's the announcement about the nofollow attribute from Google Blog, Yahoo! Search Blog, and msnsearch's WebLog. I didn't know Yahoo! and MSN had blogs. (But I first read about this whole thing on the Google Blog.) Methinks Yahoo! and MSN are Google copycats, as usual.

And now for something different. I don't usually post memes -- okay, I have never posted a meme -- but I thought this one was cool (picked it up from Scotto). Post 15 facts about yourself, but five of them have to be made up. Everyone then guesses which are the untrue ones. Then, post this on your journal and see if I can guess which ones you're bluffing about!

Well, you don't have do the second part. But take a whack at these:

1. My birthmark is on my upper arm.
2. I've met the brother of the President of the United States.
3. I own only five CDs.
4. The first thing I remember wanting to be when I grew up is a police officer.
5. I've ridden in a Goodyear blimp.
6. I've never used public transportation.
7. I am horrible at chess.
8. I always order a quesadilla when I go to a Mexican restaurant.
9. I have two chipped teeth.
10. During ninth grade I never missed a day of school or used the bathroom during class time.
11. I own four guitars.
12. I once had a fish named Neon.
13. I lived in a condominium for six weeks.
14. I visit relatives in Nebraska every three or four years.
15. I have a rock collection.

I'm not as fascinating as I thought. Or am I? Leave a comment and tell me the five ones that you think are lies. I'll post the right answers in a future entry.

(People who know me personally will probably do a little bit better, and people who live in my house and are my sister will probably be barred from participating because I solicited their help with fabricating fibs but ended up not using any of theirs.)