Comment spam and nofollow

AOL Journals hasn't been hit by comment spam yet as far as I know, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time.  We're somewhat protected because we don't allow anonymous comments, but comment spammers can get around that once they put some effort into it.
So AOL Journals plans to support the initiative to make at least one form of comment spam ineffective -- the rel="nofollow" attribute.  The idea is that this would be honored by search engines such as Google, and would mean that these links wouldn't count towards increasing the page rank of the target.  So, this form of spam would be rendered useless immediately.  Of course, other forms would still persist, but I say it's better to light a candle than curse the darkness.   Or at least do both in parallel.

Virtuous cycle of creativity

The combination of blogs and aggregation is so powerful not just because these are complementary technologies in the obvious sense, but because they promote a 'virtuous cycle' that promotes the creationa and transformation of information.   Of course this cycle is nothing new -- it's been around since forever, through the media of books, libraries, universities, newspapers, et cetera -- but the blog/aggregation combination vastly speeds up the process and reduces the transaction cost to effectively nothing.  Which makes the Long Tail of the information economy accessible.

That's why the announcement of My MSN RSS aggregation with feed search is interesting; a My MSN aggregator, plus MSN Spaces means Microsoft can leverage both sides.  So they could make it very easy, for example, to subscribe to the RSS feeds for Spaces owned by people who comment on your blog.  Or do any number of other things which increase the value of being an MSN member.  And, obviously, these tools still interoperate with the rest of the blogosphere (note that Spaces has had RSS feeds since launch).