1) has to sign up to comment
2) in the comments, the link points to a profile in boingboing.net, not his/her own website
3) in the profile page, the link towards the commenter’s own website is nofollowed.

I mean, that’s a triple hoop to jump through. I understand the nofollow part, but at lest, point towards the website, not the profile page! Leaving intelligent comments in others’ blogs is a time-honored way of making oneself known in the blogosphere.

John, this is basically a trade-off between focusing/targeting a community for a particular type of interaction (examples might include CCC, the web2summit, wikipedia, mozilla, major league baseball, FIFA, American Medical Association, OPEC, …) versus “one-size fits-all” communities which function much like mass media.

IMHO mass media and online do not mix all that well. As has been noted many years since, the STRENGTH of the internet is that is incredibly well adapted to narrowcasting — not broadcasting (remember how 9/11 crashed the web?).

If “social networks” are nonetheless set up for millions of users, then that will simply mean that the information they contain is rather noisy (and that’s why I no longer use twitter very much; in contrast, I continue to be amazed at how diligent and enthusiastically the people at digg.com are addressing such issues — and I think that slashdot and digg may very well be the “prototypical” for web 3.0 [insofar as the links actually don't matter so much as the participation of experts/enthusiasts -- this will, of course, ultimately lead to web 4.6: http://gaggle.info/miscellaneous/articles/wisdom-of-the-language ;]).

Content does not only exist “on a site” — at a higher level, content also exists “on the web“.

At this level, the domain name is also “content” (it’s “contained” at the domain name registry).

This content is far more reliable than all of the other data on the internet — and that is the primary reason why it’s so valuable.

yes, I think we agree — and the point is that the domain name (since it is registered at the registry) is really the only reliable piece of information (and links are more/less worthless.

Twitter users create ALL of the content on the site. Without the users Twitter is worthless, so they should give credit where it is due.

Its not really their page rank to horde, we created all of the content!

i hope that makes sense.

@nmw:

I love how you put this: “Google engineers were contradicting themselves by negating the validity of their very own system”

Have already posted about it – http://www.thewwwblog.com/twitter-nofollows-the-profile-links.html

I keep thinking the same way I did, but maybe that’s because I value the link above the place where it’s put at.

If individual twitter pages had their own pagerank, independent of twitter’s, then I’d vote against the NoFollow in the same way I’d vote against it in Blogger.com blogs, as what should make that link more relevant is the history of the person that put it there (which is what your personal homepage’s PageRank is supposed to be a representation of, although to be true this whole system has been corrupted).

Google’s system has been broken for a long time now. Most queries bring you to splogs, automated clickcatchers, manipulating search engines with their own DNS and such anyway.