Why Sphinn Needs a Dumbass Button
The cool thing about a specialized vertical social site like Sphinn is you tend to get a better concentration of smart people contributing stories to the community. But that’s not always the case. Rose Desrochers posted a link to a story claiming BlogCatalog doesn’t pass PageRank because their links contain OnClick. Her evidence was a SEW post from last year where Matt and Brian made some comments about the Washington Post selling blogroll links.
Andy Beard responded with a great post that explained what was really said (and more importantly, what was not said) by Matt and Brian. He also included a ton of quality researched information that would lead most sensible people to the conclusion that the idea that the mere existence of OnClick automatically prevents PageRank from being passed is probably a bit far-fetched. But Rose isn’t one of those people. Instead of responding to the specifics in Andy’s post, she instead resorted to name calling.
Now normally, I’m not a big fan of Digg’s "bury it" function, but in this case, I think it’s warranted. If we can’t get Danny to give us the ability to make a stupid post go away, then at least give us a big red Dumbass button that will flag the post as one not worth clicking on.
