I just finished reading David Allen's _Getting Things Done_. Highly 
recommended. In it he suggests that discussions ought to end up with a 
concrete "next action".

There's three different topics here: 1) the markup proposal, 2) how 
blogging tools use (or abuse) it, and 3) how search engines use (or 
abuse) it. What are the next actions?

#2 and #3 are basically off-topic here, so I won't address them, other 
than to point out that these guys will keep on working to improve things.

For #1, perhaps folks that think the name isn't helpful could go back to 
the folks behind the propsal and suggest a better name than rel="nofollow"

I consider nofollow only part of a bigger movement commonly called 
'folksonomies' [1]. A surge in popularity of the 'rel' attribute is good 
news for metadata fans.  [My prediction is that the next "big thing" 
people start noticing is that rel can take multiple, space-separated 
values.]

Anyway, what's the next actions for folksonomies? I think the HTML WG 
should take a careful look at what's out there (and under development), 
why these are proving so popular with users, and how XHTML can help make 
things even better.


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy 

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