I don't know about you, but I get a couple hundred comment spams per day. If I thought that the new rel="nofollow" scheme cooked up by some PR(?) folks in relation to Google (good info about this on this Webmaster World thread, and press releases by Google, Six Apart, MSN Search, Yahoo!, and Dave Winer) somehow were to stop this spam, I'd maybe not rant as follows.

Since I already 100% moderate all of the comments on this blog, the spam is never shown, the links never get picked up by Google, and Google's algorithms which would filter them out anyway never get to do their thing, I don't see comment spammers losing much of their incentive to spam my blog.

In my case, comment spammers already have what any otherwise-employed person would consider zero incentive. But said spammers obviously live by the motto that it never hurts to try and try again a hundred gazillion times.

Anyway, my Spammer's Choice view of this blog (explained more here) is my own, personal, cathartic-ritual approach to burning up this spam.

I'm not one to write something off before it has it's chance (and I hate being anything like a nay-sayer), but my initial reaction to rel="nofollow" is that it's basically a way to convert our frustration with comment spam into a negative feature of the web (e.g., get back at comment spammers or anyone you don't want to be nice to with our new passive-aggressive, f*ck you link).

So, because I believe in the link—the link is what made the web, made blogs, made RSS, made search engines, etc., I have no plans to use rel="nofollow" on my blogs. And, while the iCite net HTML stuff will let you use it (because various components support rel tags in general), it may be difficult for me to recognize this as a real feature that folks might want to hear more about.