This guy has a pretty convincing argument against the Google nofollow tag. He says it’s not effective against comment spam (hasn’t helped me!) but is effective at reducing the influence of blogs on Google — which is, he says, what Google wanted all along.

Hmmmmm.

UPDATE: What was I smoking when I wrote the above? The author’s argument assumes that nofollow is being used in posts. But, as commenters below point out, most of us use it only in comments. How does that harm blogs?

I should have seen this point myself.

Kevin Roderick has a fun L.A. Times correction from today:

Abortion: A March 4 column about abortion and overpopulation said that “roughly 10 billion people” die of hunger annually. The correct figure is 10 million.

This is, of course, almost certainly an innocent error. The column in question noted that the world population had hit 6.5 billion recently; it’s a safe bet that the columnist didn’t believe that almost twice that number dies every year. Still, worth a chuckle.

Via Ed Brayton, the gethuman database: shortcuts to getting through to a human when calling any number of large companies.

Of course, the more this is used, the harder it will actually be to get a human. Ah, what the hell.

I thought it might be fun to have an occasional music quote quiz. The following quotes are all from rock songs. you earn 5 points for correctly naming the band, and 1 bonus point for correctly naming the song. There are 60 total points. The first person to get the high score wins.

It’s a hard quiz. To get all 10 right, you would have to share exactly my taste in music, which is incredibly unlikely. The winning score will likely be under 30.

I’ll announce the winner on Friday, or earlier if we all get bored.

Here are the quotes:

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