Ben Hammersley has some excellent points on why the bru-ha-ha over Google's nofollow is at best wishful thinking. You see, the key thing isn't to be dazzlingly technically adept in this tit for tat; the key thing is for blogware developers (and politico policy makers) to start thinking like a spammer:

... everyone involved will be forced to try all the harder to get their links out there. The blogosphere will be hit all the harder because of the need to maximise the gains. As there's no more effort in hitting 6 million blogs as there is in hitting 1 million, this really won't bother the spammers one bit.
[ via Let no fellow nofollow, lest we all lie fallow ]

Which is, we might remember, exactly what we're seeing in the email spam circles. The perpetrators don't care if the post works or not, they don't even have the time to take the bother to sift through their newly acquired CDROM of Every Email Address and Web Comment Box on the Planet for $9.99 and see which are even still valid -- they are not about to do this any more than the FAX spammer who still, two years after I last plugged in a fax machine, calls us daily at 9am sharp trying to 'post' something with no return phone number. It's our Old Faithful wake-up call.

Wringing The Golden Goose

All the spammer wants is to switch on a cheap PC, load up a disk they bought for a dime on a blackmarket somewhere, and then just sit on a beach sipping Margaritas because, from that moment on, the bank-balance is always positive.

Who can blame them? Sociopathic as it may be to the toe-trodden us of the fringe digital in-crowd, how can we diss their magic goose? It's a legal money-press! Bootleg gin without the messy cleanup, growing pot without resin in your hair! Best of all, it is completely and totally legal ... everywhere! -- and, hey, even if the better'n'pogey monthly residual does slip back a notch due to some new hacker trick, heck, you don't have to stay up late figuring it out when just $300 out of petty cash buys another machine ...

When you are conditioning any animal, you first need to get their attention. When they put geometric shapes in the rat-maze, no rat cared a bit until we realized that rats look down and moved the shapes from the doors to the floor (whereupon the rats displayed remarkable abilities in geometric recognition).

If you want to influence students, it won't work to suspend their calculus priviledges; you have to get their attention by valving the flow of something that is important to them. The only thing that's important to the spammers is the life of leisure; if you made them actually work for that same income, I'd bet we'd see a lot less spam.

Unfortunately, there's no known viable method that makes the beach-situated Margarita consumer do anything more than up their cluster, and I'll bet there's a lineup of unemployed IT freeks jumping at those sorts of gigs.

Kill the Cause

So ... what's left? Being basically a medaeval temperment, I appeal to the Principle of First Cause: The root cause of that margarita is not the bartender, the distillery or even the worm -- it's the dollar you wave to get it. We have to face this, and no amount of geeky hoop-jumps will substitute for simply defining spam as illegal, which George Bush failed to do because doing so would label him "unamerican" (because, as we note above, isn't the spam-engine money-machine truly the American Dream?) -- and then we have to go that extra mile, and give teeth to the legislation.

Which does make me wonder: AOL, MSN, all those guys, they say spam costs them money, so, like, then why don't they spend some fraction of that loss collaboratively brainstorming a foolproof legal precident for suing the bastards? I mean, we can prevent a Norwegian student from reporting real news about Scientology, and we can't stop some two-bit hood from soaking up billions in aggregate costs of business?