Scoble gives more info on the rel=”nofollow” standard and how the search engine & blog tools folk are moving quickly and working together to implement it:

Thanks Google (and MSN and Yahoo).

Oh, and, did anyone notice how Google got its competitors to do something without needing to get a standards committee involved? All within hours?

Hmm, why doesn’t everything in the industry work like this?

This is a win all around. It slows down the spammers, allows bloggers and others to point to things without increasing page rank. And that is like having another kind of pointing.

Here’s the next step: Let’s have an attribute where we can give a qualitative or quantitative description of how much whuffie we want to give or not give to a link. A bit more work in the search engine, but not much. I’d like something like that to have more than one dimension and I’d love to see it qualitative, emotional even. How about an attribute like rel=”opinion:good but too expensive” or rel=”opinion:i love it” or more boringly: rel=”opinion:5/10″ (half good) or: rel=”opinion:-5/10″ (half bad). I like using words to describe this stuff, other wise you need to come up with multi-dimensional measurements. Maybe google would even let us write python expressions as opinions.

But really, the idea is to make sure that we can give our feelings about a link. This helps humanize the web even more. And the search engines will need these sort of clues to make the web smarter, easier to use and more human. How about it?