The first ten comments left by unique people get an invite. These invites will be mailed out tomorrow sometime.

Believe it or not, leaving two comments with different email addresses does not qualify as unique. You see, all comments are logged with the IP address of the commentor. It qualifies as cheating and you will not get any invites…

These invites have been been provided by Mr. Strange and djrickp. Thanks!

I threw together a little REST love to serve up custom eBay searches via RSS. Give it a try. Each feed updates every hour and lists as many as 100 auctions ending soon. Let me know what you think.

Link: eBay RSS Feeds

The first ten comments left by unique people get an invite. These invites will be mailed out tomorrow sometime.

Believe it or not, leaving two comments with different email addresses does not qualify as unique. You see, all comments are logged with the IP address of the commentor. It qualifies as cheating and you will not get any invites…

These invites have been been provided by Mr. Strange. Thanks!

The first eleven comments left by unique people get an invite. These invites will be mailed out tomorrow sometime.

These invites have been been provided by Mr. Strange. Thanks!

The first five comments left by unique people get an invite. These invites will be mailed out tomorrow sometime.

Four of the invites are from your truly and one from Mr. Strange. Thanks!

My thoughts on the new rel=”nofollow” idea can best be summed by following this parody link: LinkCondom. If I had even the slightest level of artistic skill I would make a rel=”nofollow” button surrounded by a circle with a slash through it. I trust someone will address this soon?

STOP! Everyone needs to take a few breaths and step back and consider for a moment what this really means. Noble idea? Yes. Does it address the problem? Somewhat. But, I hereby declare that killing an elephant with a fission bomb is overkill.

Consider what the wholesale implementation of this new web standard means within the blogosphere. “nofollow” is English for NO FOLLOW and common sense dictates that when spider finds this tag it will not follow the subsequent link. Six Apart and company have created plugins that apply this tag unselectively thereby destroying the power of blogs. Blogs are about community. Blogs are about linking. If we tag all comments and trackbacks as “nofollow” we have reduced the blogosphere to the status of the common, less connected web. This is a step backwards. More importantly, this is a win for the spammers. You see, we have given up our linking liberty to elimiate their impact within the web.

The proper way to implement this new tag is for each software provider to intelligently implement the tag in a way that negates the impact of anonymous posts and trackbacks but that does not impact links from known sources. Kudos to LiveJournal. They get it. Six Apart does not.

I agree that the implementation of a method that determines “known” trackback pings versus anonymous trackback pings will require thought but thought is *required*.

UPDATE: O.K., the nofollow tag does not suck. Forgive the tabloid headline. Insert implementations into the title between NOFOLLOW and sucks. “NOFOLLOW Implementations Suck!” Kudos to Google for the initiative. Kudos to LiveJournal for a reasonable implementation of “nofollow”

UPDATE TWO: Even more interesting, this blanket approach create a very real balance issue in the blogosphere. The big guys get bigger and the little (or new) guys can’t get any search engine exposure. A sort of blog “sandbox” in the approximate spirit of Google’s much discussed sandbox effect for new sites. Unlike Google’s sandbox effect, this new tag, once applied, would have very little chance of being removed. Let the conspiracy theorists loose!

According to Jeremy Zawodny on the Yahoo blog, the new “nofollow” tag is not just a Google solution; the comment spam defense is being implemented by every major player in the search / blogging universe. Implementing the new standard are: saerch engines Google, Yahoo, MSN, as well as blog software Blogger (from Google), TypePad, MovableType, LiveJournal (from Six Apart), MSN Spaces and WordPress.

Six Apart explains that they were approached by the Google Search team, who came up with the idea. TypePad subscribers will see “nofollow” implemented automatically in the next 24 hours. Movable Type has a plugin to install for it, available here. Finally, LiveJournal will be implementing it, but only for non-friends (which is actually kind of nice).

(Via InsideGoogle.)

So, I get a dozen trackback pings from a weblog I have never heard of: Inside Out. Cool, but twelve trackbacks from one entry. Hmm… I check it out and while my SPAM bells are ringing, I figure the guy just likes my site. But then today another 25+ trackbacks pop up. Wow, this *is* amazing. Either he misunderstands the fundamental purpose of trackbacks, is really excited about GMail resources, or is building his nascent trackback SPAM operation and trying to grab some quick pagerank and build some backlink juice on some hot keyword anchor text. 38+ trackback pings? I vote SPAM. I could be wrong — so let’s review proper trackback manners. I like an blog post on your site. I trackback that entry as I write my entry, not my favorite 38.

Sure, I got good GMail content. Awesome. Link my main GMail page at: http://www.aimlesswords.com/gmail. Not my entire GMail archive…

Paul, the blog owner, is probably not using trackback pings to build PR. Probably not…

The first three comments left by unique people get an invite. These invites will be mailed out tomorrow sometime.

* These invites were donated by djrickp. A damn nice guy and decent chess player!

Update: I should have checked before posting. He sent me the note 9 hours ago and I have been traveling so… no invites left. Sorry.

Brihas sent me a note today informing me that GMail-O-Matic has over 200 invites available. If you need one, run over there and jump into the queue. No waiting!

Source: GMail-O-Matic