By default, a link boosts someone's pagerank. You have to go out of your way to remove that boost, or credit, and I just don't think that's right.
Why is the default behavior in any way significant? It is completely an accident of how HTML has been designed by many different people over time.
Suppose NOFOLLOW had caught on in a very large way among web tool vendors. Further suppose that every single content system and HTML editing tool had made rel="nofollow" the default everywhere you create a link.
Then you'd have to "go out of your way" to grant someone a page rank boost. Would that change your attitude? Why?
It would be like giving a lecture about the KKK and refusing to mention their name.
I completely disagree with this analogy. I can mention Sylvia Browne hundreds of times without linking to her. Readers of my article can be on her site in just a matter of a few clicks. Indeed, with nofollow I can link directly to her and provide access to all her nonsense in ONE click. How am I denying her anything important?
I think a more appropriate analogy would be this
completely hypothetical scenario:
There are two ways to discuss other people or organizations in public. One is widely known by everyone, and another is buried in an obscure regulation that most people don't know.
The widely known rule allows you to talk about anyone in any way that you want, as long as you donate $1 to that person or organization's billboard advertising fund. These are links without nofollow, they implicitly provide advertising to the other organization, advertising that organization can use in ways you have no control over and cannot anticipate.
The other, lesser known rule, allows you to talk about them in exactly the same way, but you mail a post card about this to the government to waive the $1 fee. Everyone still knows exactly who you are talking about and can contact them equally well, but you are not required to provide advertising funds. These are nofollow links.
Personally, faced with those two choices, I would mail the postcard.
If someone googles Sylvia Browne, I want them to find her site. I also want them to find our site, and the posts on the forum, etc.
Jeff, you
cannot prevent another site from appearing in a search engine via nofollow. Indeed, you can link directly to her with nofollow and the reader doesn't even have to type her name. Where is she losing anything?
Why should anyone other than the site's own webmaster feel responsible for their search engine placement? I certainly don't feel any obligation to boost JREF's placement, and in fact I do not have JREF linked in my blogroll.
To answer Rolfe.. if people are talking about a site, that means it's important, and its pagerank should increase.
Ah, but remember the basic assumption of Google's Page Rank algorithm is that links are positive in nature. Quoting from the
Page Rank patent:
Because citations, or links, are ways of directing attention, the important documents correspond to those documents to which the most attention is directed. Thus, a high rank indicates that a document is considered valuable by many people or by important people.
Is Sylvia Browne's content "valuable"? Does JREF officially endorse Sylvia Browne's content as "valuable"? Whether you realize it or agree with it or not, that is what Google's robots are deriving from your links.
Oh #$@# ... of all the things I missed, I missed that the most 
