The whirlwind leak, then announcement, followed by blog mentions, media coverage, then implementation by the major players (SixApart/Movable Type, Yahoo and MSN) that Google had developed a new tag to prevent comment spam on blogs really shows the power of the blogging community.

It has not even been 24 hours since Google's announcement of the rel="nofollow" tag and all the industry leaders are on board. I've already downloaded the plugin for MT, so have other bloggers. The install is quick and easy.

The major hosted-blogging platforms (TypePad & Blogger) will soon offer this standard on the millions of blogs they host.

Comment spam was becoming a major issue. I have been battling it almost daily. I even had a few clients that were hesitant to start blogs for fear of not being able to control it. But now within 24 hours it goes from being a major issue to a non-issue. As Scoble put it:

Hmm, why doesn't everything in the industry work like this?

Yes why not.