There's been a lot of activity around tagging links of late. Today, Google announced that they are supporting an industry-wide initiative to not count links that are tagged with the rel="nofollow" attribute in their PageRank calculation. MSN, and Yahoo are aboard as well. Technorati is also supporting this effort, and those tagged links won't contribute to a blog's Technorati Authority, the total number of people linking to an blog. This is an important first step in removing the incentive for comment spammers from creating and propagating comment and trackback spam.

This is an open call to all of the folks in the weblog industry: Let's have a Web 2.0 Spam Squashing Summit. Let's continue to work together as an industry and as individual implementers, search engines, and toolmakers to work on squashing out comment, link, tag, photo, and other types of spam by giving users the tools they need to be empowered to squash the spammers dead.

Let's do it soon. If you're interested in participating, link/trackback to this post, tag your post with spamsummit (or leave a comment, heh) and we'll get the mailing list and infrastructure set up. Kudos to all, let's keep this going.

Tags: spamsummit