x AKA M. wrote:

I had missed the point being to communicate with spiders. It became more clear due to Kevins patient explanation at Joi Ito’s blog in this thread. I thought it was so people could vote on links, not spiders.

Yes, Kevin’s explanations are great. However, just for whoever else’s reading this, I’d like to make clear that people (or at least whoever puts the links on the site) do vote on the links, but it’s the spiders (not other people) who count the votes.

I had not thought about, spiders, bots, and engines out there secretly logging your activities and words and generating Whuffie points. Cool thought.

Exactly, having an attribute would make all that much easier; see how TechnoRati and Google have to jump through hoops to do their rankings, and still they have no clue whether my links are meant to be positive or negative. Also, votes will not depend on anything whatsoever being installed on the site being voted on, which is extremely important.