Over the years, I have gone on record stating the importance in allowing users the ability to leave comments at this site anonymously. I have always recognized that there is a segment of the online community that likes to submit quality comments online, but they don't want to be required to leave an online trail that can be traced back to personal online accounts. Despite all the trouble I've had with the spammers and bots, the benefits of anonymous comments was always worth it to me in hopes of reading that one life changing comment provided by someone who preferred to stay in the shadows.

After six years of running CMS Report, I've decided too much has changed in the online world to continue allowing anonymous comments to continue here. During the past couple years, I've noticed the quality of conversation taking place at this site and other sites drop significantly. In part, I think the drop in quality comments is due to social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ now providing additional avenues for readers and writers to have their opinions be made known. I also think social media has allowed people to become so comfortable with themselves having an online presence that they no longer are comfortable being in conversations with anonymous people. If my last few months with Google+ has taught me anything, it is that people want to have conversation only when everyone in the room has been identified.

The level of interest in content management systems astounds me. Each year, I continue to see at CMS Report an increase of visitors looking for information on content management. Our stories tend to focus on open source CMS more than proprietary applications and evidently that's the subject matter that our readers want to read.

Below are the top ten stories of 2009 that were posted here at CMSReport.com. As you can see, stories involving Drupal, WordPress, Joomla!, Alfresco, and Nuxeo took center stage. These stories might not have been the ten I would have personally picked for this list, but I'll respect the numbers behind their ranking.

1. Mollom: A solution for comment spam
2. 2009 Best Open Source PHP CMS: Drupal wins, Wordpress and Joomla! not far behind
3. Serving a home for my Drupal site
4. WordPress leads the Packt as 2009 Overall Best Open Source CMS
5. Allen Ellis: Why the Packt CMS Competition is Broken, and How to Fix It
6. Google PageRank
7. Alfresco Module Obtains U.S. DoD 5015.02 Records Management Certification
8. Using Wordpress city saves $19,000
9. Cheryl McKinnon, Nuxeo, and Open Source
10. Drupal Gardens preview video by Acquia

The interest in Nuxeo took me by surprise and I'll be adding the CMS to my top 30 CMS Focus page as time allows. As always, our thanks to all those who continue to return to this site to read the stories, join in on the conversation, and even submit articles. As I've said before, I'm not sure we would be doing this if it wasn't for the interest shown by others visiting the site.

CMS Wire's Barb Mosher reported about a forum posting by a Google Employee explaining why PageRank has been dropped from the Google Webmaster Tools. Barb writes:

Do you constantly watch the Google toolbar in your browser to see if your Google PageRank has changed? Do you worry constantly about why your rank is less than that of a competitor? Well, there may not be any reason to worry any longer.

Google has dropped PageRank data from Webmaster Tools.

Google has for some time discussed that PageRank is a very small factor among many factors that they look at for placing a particular indexed page on a search results page. Dropping PageRank from the Webmaster Tools appears to be just one more step in moving PageRank away from everyone's attention.

We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. :-)

I have observed that indeed PageRank doesn't matter for placement on Google's search pages. I've seen CMSReport.com's front page ranked from as low as "3" to as high as "7" over the years. Although the page rank has varied over time, the placement of my web pages on the search pages have stayed about the same. Relevancy of the page to the search terms being used seems to have a much greater impact on how well your site ranks with the search engine. Additional details on why Google doesn't see PageRank as a good measurement for a site can be found on one of their Webmaster FAQ.

Yesterday afternoon Google announced at their Webmaster Central Blog that Google is changing the architecture of its search engine. These changes are expected to improve the speed, accuracy, and completeness of the Google search engine. Better yet, the prototype for the enhanced search engine is available for public testing.

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Some parts of this system aren't completely finished yet, so we'd welcome feedback on any issues you see. We invite you to visit the web developer preview of Google's new infrastructure at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and try searches there.

When first using Microsoft's new Bing search engine one of the surprises for me was the speed in which the results were delivered. I suspect that it's probably no coincidence that as competition heats up Google now sees a need to improve the infrastructure for delivering search results to its users. Whatever the reason, I'm happy to see that changes are coming.

I also have to admit that I get a secret pleasure in knowing that changes with Google's search engine will put those search engine optimization (SEO) folks on even shakier ground. These are the folks that claim for a price they can put your website pages on top of Google's index pages. As you can tell from my tone, I'm not a big believer in SEO. I'm a big believer that writing good content on your site is the only search engine optimization you ever really need. Hopefully Google's new search engine will continue to prove my point.

I'm doing a little morning reading at some of my favorite Internet spots.  A couple of this morning's IT related posts that caught my attention:

• Rich Hoeg (eContent) has created a very nice tutorial/screencast on Google's SearchWiki.  Personally, I can't decide if this is a good move for Google or not.  It seems to me the biggest benefit of Google is that you go there, do a search, find the link you want, and get out.  Internet junkies like me already are too distracted with places like Digg.com that I like Google's single purpose pages.  When I'm on a search mission, I don't need the collateral damage.
• Dries Buytaert explains the weaknesses of serving your own CAPTCHA to fight spam and the benefits of Mollom hosting CAPTCHAs for you.  He also discusses the dirty business of comment spam where services will leave comment spam at sites like yours and mine for a fee.  As I commented on Dries blog, comment spam makes this world a scary place for website owners. I'm glad we have Mollom!