On the surface, when Dave Winer put up a placeholder post this weekend on the Bloggercon site promising "an interesting announcement," there didn't appear to be much more to the story. But since then several bloggers have reported that Winer was testing a new Google linking mechanism that might put an end to blog comment spam by omitting all links from its PageRank calculations that have a rel="nofollow" attribute tag. This would change the economics behind why people comment spam popular blogs - to boost their Google search rank. If this is true, it would certainly be welcome. Stay tuned.








