Over at kuro5hin.org there is an ahem article called 'Why your Movable Type blog must die' where the author rants on and on about old bugs in Movable Type, bloggers in general, and how we bloggers fuck up Google's page ranking system. Here is a quote before I continue any further.
his is what makes your blogs worse than useless. Previously, they were merely bundles of listless rambling scattered around the Web. Now their effects are positively toxic, choking search engines as they grow continuously and invasively.I'm not sure where to start... I take blogging pretty seriously, I like to try to write something that is at least helpful, informative, relevant, or at the very least funny. So when someone rants on and on and generalizes that what I post is useless... should I stop? Naw!If you try to search Google on any kind of nonmainstream topic which has been discussed amongst yourselves, it's entirely possible that all of the top search results are from a few well-connected bloggers who have blabbed about a subject and then been TrackBacked over and over again by hundreds of other people. TrackBack and "other related blog entries" are hypertextual viruses for fucking up Google, I swear. PageRank was not designed for this sort of linking where each in a series of a thousand pages links to all of the other 999 pages.
James talks about how us bloggers hurt PageRank. I hate to break it to him, but trackback enhances Google's page ranking system. How you may ask? simple only good posts tend to get trackbacked, thus bringing the useful information to the top of Google's list. If what the blogger had said was not profound, why would anyone go through the bother of trackbacking? Its not worth it in my humble opinion, most of the tools out there for trackbacking are less that easy to use, and most blogs are not properly setup for the task to begin with.
In the end of James' rant he tells us Movable Type users to 'Move your shit over to LiveJournal" which makes me wonder if he works for the folks over at LiveJournal... its possible, don't you think?
Ok last note, also in James' rant he says we only talk about free software, politics, and blogging. He's got us there, except for all those Microsoft bloggers... crazy rebels.