It's not often that a blogger loses credibility with me and I decide to do something about it. John Chow is one of those bloggers. I won't even do him the courtesy of linking to him as a reference anymore. I briefly mentioned my decision in my Blog Drive-Bys for 2007-05-22. Read that article for a link to his.
This is only the second blogger to irritate me enough to remove his blog feed and his link from my blogroll. It doesn't bother me to do so because I never fell for his "write a review for a link back" program.
The first one I removed from my feeds was Lifehacker as I detailed in my article, Lifehacker Ignores Their Mistake, where completely bogus information from one of their readers was seemingly endorsed. They did not acknowledge their mistake until AFTER it was pointed out by several bloggers (including me). Read my article for the link to theirs.
John Chow irritated me by usurping the "dofollow" movement. Many bloggers who use WordPress as their blogging platform (as do I) installed one of several plugins to defeat the default "rel=nofollow" tag that's added to comment URLs by the software. I was one of them. The purpose of it was to give commenters (who are also bloggers) a link back to their blogs with no penalties from search engines. Not only did John decide not to install the plugin, he decided he would make money from other bloggers by creating a program where bloggers could pay him to have the tag removed from their blog comments.
I may not have the best blog in the world (far from it) but I refuse to have it even remotely associated with bloggers that use or abuse their readers in any way, shape or form. Sure, their blogs are their blogs and they have the right to use them anyway they want. I'm sure it won't bother them to lose just little old me as a reader, but if more people know and more people follow suit, I'm sure it'll bother them a whole lot more.
Acknowledgment: I was inspired to write this by a comment from Comedy Plus in response to the aforementioned drive-by article. Thank you Comedy Plus.
I might as well kick him out of my reader too, and still feel no difference, since what ever he writes is common content, found all over the net, nuthing original or earth shattering. and y is the word s.o.r.r.y being moderated?
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