off.Root

Do you read blogs? Do you pay attention to what your customers are saying — not just to you directly, but everywhere else? On the Internet? Hope so.

Recently I’ve been thinking a bit on the impact that forms of mass-communication have been having — or, perhaps, should have been having — on big business.

Isn’t it word-of-mouth that’s the ever-so-desirable form of spreading the word on a product? Isn’t that the same thing that often helps those in the know to shy away from an offering that doesn’t deliver? Blogs are an amplification of word-of-mouth, where one user can have a water-cooler type conversation with thousands of other ones — so why aren’t more people paying attention?

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Google’s had fun pushing its AutoLink functionality, and as would be expected there are those — particularly in the blogosphere — who have voiced their opposition (some more vocally than others).

The problem with AutoLink is that it transparently alters the content of an author’s page, all without the author’s knowledge, consent, or ability to remove such functionality (and remember, Google puts the fun in functionality). To the best of my knowledge the links aren’t even marked with a rel=”autolink” or something similar that would allow an author to note those links in an aesthetically pleasing manner (although requiring developers to have to opt-out of transparency is still backwards).

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off.Root is a much cooler name for this blog, at least cooler than “newBlog.” The idea actually came from our friend Gecko, who in mentioning that he didn’t understand anything on this site said things were easier to follow over in root, which I thought was nifty. So this is now off.Root, because it looked better with the dot in there. Old URLs should redirect to their appropriate locations automagically, you’re welcome. Also worth noting, I upgraded to the final WP 1.5 release.

(Sidenote: I originally was going to title this entry “Nofollow: destroyer of the Intraweb…?” but decided the new title was more fitting.)

I’ve been (somewhat) on the fence about the whole rel=”nofollow” thing, as not-so-recently announced by Google and a couple friends. Here’s a draft spec, for the uninitiated. But a lot of people who are gung-ho about nofollow being the single worst thing to ever happen to the Internet need to reevaluate some of their views. Perhaps their conclusion (nofollow is more harm than good) isn’t necessarily inaccurate, but their assumptions most certainly are.

It’d seem to me that in order to declare using rel=”nofollow” on links that can’t be trusted officially “bad,” it would have to be proven that nofollow would actually worsen the current situation with comment and trackback spam. And few people have seemed to be able to make that argument. Most who say it’s a bad thing say so because it breaks the Internet, destroys the “web” of links within the blogosphere, or simply wouldn’t stop the efforts of spammers in the first place. And of course, there are those who swear that this is just another ploy by Google to get it closer to world-domination. I have my doubts about at least that last point, but the problem with these arguments is either that they’re untrue or don’t make nofollow “bad.” Ineffective, perhaps. Not “bad.”

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