http://www.ASPAlliance.com now allows you to comment on articles - great stuff. Constructive feedback is always beneficial to authors, particularly people writing technical articles. Only problem is we will need to dilute the utility of this feature because of gits who will abuse it. What am I talking about?
Well, there is a growing trend in the dodgier districts of SEO land where people use low paid staff or bots to trawl the web looking for places where they can add links. Blog spam, wiki spam, comment spam, sandbox spam, call it what you will, they are exploiting search engine algo love of links to further their own ends at your article or blogs expense.
And the worse thing? Your own blog or site could be harmed in the process because you are linking to a bad neighbourhood :O(
I firmly believe in PageRank, I think the web is about links and it is a good way of working out if a site is considered important or not, see explaination and discussion on the topic here and here. I don't think PageRank is at fault, stop urls being posted (even though they are useful and interesting) on your site and the spammers will not bother you.
Edit: Just to prove my point, look what is happening in the comments here before he deletes them (links added in the comments, no text, just adult links. Shameless)
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/002068.html
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2004/05/eureka.html
So Seth Godin coined the term "landing pages"? Cool. In this blog he talks about increasing the effectiveness of landing pages. I agree how critical it is. I find marketeers often focus on the initial ad and hope for the best with the landing page. It's amazing how even the smallest tweak can make several % difference. For example, sending the visitor to a page that is actually about what the ad was about (send them to the product rather than the store homepage), or making it obvious what you want the visitor to do (click "buy"!). People often look at me oddly when I suggest testing multiple landing pages - "This is our page and it was approved by the committee and the CEO, we are not changing it. Besides, 'click here' is a perfectly fine call to action. The flash intro only takes 15mins to play out.".
Here is another idea; if your site is there to make you money make your 404 page useful. Even if only one in a thousand visitors see it, they will thank you for it.
Mr Godin is the author of several of my top 20 marketing books. (Even though it is an ever changing list where flux is the only constant I am sure "Permission Marketing" would always be in there).