Linkspam: Life on Mars, paid protest, Wikipedia gives up, and Wordpress is so cool...

[matgb]

• El Reg reports that you can now rent people to join your protest in Germany. Potential protesters get paid, but aren't obliged to agree unless it's something they agree with. Hmm, attack on the principles of democracy, an example of 'everything for sale', or a simple way to motivate otherwise apathetic activists? Let's face it, if you were going to be paid to turn up at the next Parliament Square protest, you might actually do it, right?


• Right then, Life On Mars I've heard many many good things about this show, and then today mng linked to loveandgarbage who was linking to this awesome trailer for the next series, which shows the main characters as if they're in Camberwick Green! How cool is that? I hate to do this, but The Sun has the best version of the promo picture. So, maybe I should've bought the DVD box set in the January sales for £20 after all? Ah no, Sendit has it for £16 and Choices for £14. Bargain. Now if Mike had any decent image manip software, I'd be iconning myself up, they're so cool.


• Now, I read about this on roughtype a few days back, but have been busy/net deprived, but Wikipedia has implemented rel="nofollow" for all outgoing links. This is a BAD BAD THING. Now, whatever we think of Google the corporation, Google the search engine, and specifically the PageRank formula, is essentially democracy in action. The readon it works is because it aggregates all the links out there and figures out which are the most popular (and therefore useful) sites. rel="nofollow" is there for webmasters to say that they don't trust a link, or they don't want to vote for it. By putting nofollow on all its outgoing links (in a spurious and useless attempt to fight spam), Wikipedia is effectively both denying other sites their votes (and opting out of the democracy), but also asserting clearly that their content is untrustworthy, cannot be guarnateed and they don't want to give legitimate credit.  That last links to a Wordpress Plugin that I'll be putting in next time I update, and from now on I'll be nofollowing any links to Wikipedia that I make, and I urge others to do the same.  If they want to opt out of the Google democracy, they should do it both ways (as, for example, daweaver's The Snow in Summer already does) and say they don't want inbound links either.  Of course the real issue is linkspam in the form of blog comments, and of course disreputable Search Marketers who do things the bad way, as Tim described one company to me, a bunch of spamming twunts.
• Last up (for now) Wordpress 2.1 is out, which means lj2wordpress should be kicking start a little more, I need to catch up with some things, and reply to a few emails, but this particular project looks like it'll have real legs.  After all, Livejournal is slowly dying.  Journal Press will rock.  Hopefully.

Oh, for those not scrolling back again; I've got a place to live in London, start moving in Saturday.  Comes with wireless broadband and all bills included, which will be nice.