One of the biggest plays currently happening in the "Web 2.0" evolution is PageRank whoring (because PageRank is worth big money) - everyone trying to get you to link to their domain somehow.

Maybe they're handing out "blog awards" and the celebratory icon requires some sort of link back attribution, or they want to add you to their aggregation, but demand that you place various links to them on your site that they'll automatically harvest (and continually validate) to "ensure" that you're legitimate. Some even require a link to a script (that'll do who knows what at some future point) on their site in the header of your blog.

Whatever the case, it's clear that many Web 2.0 strategies these days are based on PageRank as a short-term substitute for money, and clearly these sites are hoping that a PR9 will get them good VC funding.

Examples abound on the net, but this came to mind looking at the way Technorati requires that you decorate your posts to "tag" them in the Technorati world - instead of some general, cross-industry tagging mechanism (e.g. "put a list of tags in square brackets to the right of Tags in your post. e.g. Tags: [SQL Server][etc.]"), you have to add links to various Technorati tag URLs in your posts. 

Not only is Technorati building their entire value based upon external blogger provided content, but you also need to hand over some pagerank to them as well to be categorized properly (and to head off bloggers using rel=nofollow, they also demand that you use rel=tag. How covenient). Imagine if Google demanded that your page add links to every Google searchword that you want to be indexed by? Give me a break.

Technorati is trying to monopolize the blog world, and I'm really quite surprized how quickly so many rolled over for it. They seem to provide a nice service, but they shouldn't require quite the level of complicity by the blog community (unless they're making every contributing blogger an equity owner).

BTW: Could every blogger please link to this post? Thanks! I want to boast about how high my imaginary Technorati rating is so I can generate meaningless "what this blog is worth" numbers.

Irony = Technorati Profile