nofollow - To Stop Comment Spam
A great initiative to stop comment spam has been the introduction of the rel="nofollow" tag that Google has come up with and other major search engines and blogging software vendors are supporting.
The reason for comment spam is to get yourself ranked high on search engines page ranks. But including "nofollow" on the link means that search engines will ignore those URLs. Comment spam is thus redundant... Well aside from anyone foolish enough to click on it anyway.
So, http://james.cridland.net/ this http://james.cridland.net/ won't http://james.cridland.net/ go http://james.cridland.net/ anywhere http://james.cridland.net/ for http://james.cridland.net/ Google http://james.cridland.net/ at http://james.cridland.net/ all?
How boring.
Sadly for your Google page rank James, this particular comment won't help you one little bit!
It might be worth mentioning that this also is a good idea for all places where users can post URLs - not just in blogs.
Bulletin boards and discussion areas, like http://www.mediauk.com/discussions/viewtopic.muk?p=371924 are also a good place to incorporate this code. And if you follow that link, you'll find I've done my little bit for Google.