No less a person than Google's Matt Cuttsrecently spoke up about herding Googlebot andmore or less recommend using the noindex meta tag on pages instead of nofollow on links to them (on the grounds that it's more of a surething to mark pages noindex than to make sure that all links are markednofollow).

I must respectfully disagree with this, because in one importantrespect meta noindex isn't good enough. The big thing that nofollow does that meta noindex can't do is that it

Speaking from personal experience: never, ever set up an out of officeautoreply that sends email to the From: address of incoming email.Never. Or if you must do this, unsubscribe from all of the mailing listsyou're on first.

If you fail to do this, the users of the mailing lists you are on willkill you. And shortly afterward, the managers of the mailing lists youare on will drop you with extreme prejudice, because the last thingwe want is for the active users

This week, we:

• got 13,932 messages from 204 different IP addresses.
• handled 17,417 sessions from 865 different IP addresses.
• received 161,727 connections from at least 52,444 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 50 connections being checked at once (hiton Friday).

This is about the same as last week ,allowing for random variation. The per day table is mostly butnot entirely flat

Yesterday I wrote about how sysadmins are overhead . One of the consequences of this is thatIT does not actually have real power. The real power accrues to thepeople who are doing the organization's work, whereas IT is just keepingthe machines dust-free.

Remembering this will make life less explosive, because the people withactual power can usually squash IT flat in thirty seconds if push comesto shove. Generally you don't want it to go that far.

(This is part of the core of