Follow Me, And Stop Caving In To The Barbarians.

Pink. More Pink. And Still More Pink.

Everywhere i go I see all of this pink. It's not the pretty shade of pink that makes me smile when my daughter insists on wearing it. It's a harsh, insistent pink that screams the anguished cry of helplessness. It is the pink of despair and surrender.

It's the pink that defaces so many good sites now like technorati.com and wikipedia.com.

It's sad really that this pink has taken on such negative connotations for me. Once it was a tool that had great power. But like any great power, misuse can lead to some downright ugly scars.

The thing that's made it so bad is how it's splashed all over the comments and trackback sections of blogs. This is not right. It's not polite. It's downright rude.

Especially when it's so damn easy to correct.

I'm talking, of course about the common style convention of placing pink boxes around rel=nofollow links. Well, technically I'm not talking about the style, but the fact that bloggers have utterly surrendered to spammers.

We've tucked in our tails, rolled over to expose our bellies and admitted that spammers are smater (or at least possess more passion and drive) than us.

Shame.

How does it feel deep down in your creative, constructive soul to admit out front and in the open that you are too lazy to actually fight to retain your tools at the first real battle with the barbarians? They possess scripts. They possess automated tools. That's really all they have on their side. And yet we just threw no follow at them and washed our hands like so many pontus pilate wannabes.

We blog and moan about the spam, and the only thing we do to try to stop it is punish the people who come to our blogs and take the time to make valuable contributions through real comments and trackbacks.

And it's completely pathetic.

Yes, pathetic! Especially if you blog with WordPress.

All you have to do is get Spam Karma and Do Follow. Install those two plugins (It will consume a full 15-20 minutes of your life) and you can trade real links with good folks who do things properly and not have to worry about the spammers.

So here's the deal.

Take the pledge. Take back the comment and trackback space. Install the plugins. Post in the comments here that you will follow links to the good commenters and trackbackers and fight the good fight. I If you need help. If you have problems. If you have questions about how to get these things installed on your blog let me know and I will help you.

Not only that. I'll set up a page here on this blog for bloggers who follow, and I'll link to you permanently. Your choice of family friendly keywords leading to your family friendly blog. And I'll go on a link building bender to grab some good page rank for that page. And I'll beg other people to also put up pages linking to the follow bloggers.

So what about it? Are you blogger enough to stand and fight? Or are you gonna hide behind little pink boxes for the rest of your life?

Your choice.