It’s been brought to my attention that the nofollow tag is supposed to pertain only to comments.
This is small comfort to those of use who experience weblogs as conversation. Some of the best comments refer to resources, citations, counter-examples. Links that are especially valuable to page-rank, because they are selected in context.
Google etc are trying to remove the reward from spam, but in the process they’re removing the reward for conversation.
It depends on how it’s implemented. I like what LiveJournal is doing with “rel=nofollow” — they are labeling links from anonymous or non-friend commenters with that attribute, but posts from friends of the orignal poster, as well as other “acknowledged” replies, don’t have the links altered.
Perhaps it could be left as an option for each blog author? (default to use the attribute, but you can go in and turn it off)