Still More Advertising Links

An Anonymous Coward writes: "MSNBC.com has the latest on the controversial Smart Tags technology that got punted from Windows XP. This time it's not Microsoft doing the dirty deed, but a couple of 3rd-party companies. And they already have 500,000 users installed. I can see the lawyers salivating already."

Comments

Re:They've crossed the line long ago

[localroger]

They can't change the way I want to present my homepage, now the line is crossed a looooong time ago!

Unfortunately, they can. It's the way the Internet works.

Right now I am voluntarily running Proxomitron, a web proxy which strips out ad banners, popups, and assorted misc.trash from the pages I view. And there's not a damn thing webpage designers can do about it except convince me to disable the proxy.

Things like surf+ are like anti-Proxomitrons that introduce spam instead of filtering it out; the only "cure" is to educate consumers and provide information on removing this software if they've installed it. As long as they can be uninstalled, you can't hope for much more. Of course, the kind of integration Microsoft was developing for XP is another kettle of fish altogether.

Most annoying

[error0x100]

"And they are starting to understand that they must accept some advertising in order to support free content on the Net."

This reasoning by itself, I can understand. There is just one problem with it - I don't see the part where I am "supported" for the free content I provide .. it would seem that eZula is going to get money for "supporting" the 'free content I provide and pay for on my website. How is this "supporting" free content then? Is eZula going to send me some money for each hit their advertisers get from links they inserted into my web page? Of course not. So how can they argue that their TopText software is "supporting free content" in *any* way? They're just riding off the success of other people's websites, literally, like parasites .. in fact, TAKING AWAY advertising revenue that those site owners might have gotten from their own adverts, as site owners would get fewer hits. This is thusly damaging to free content providers.

Re:How do they work?

[Bilbo]

It's a user installed plugin for the browser, not unlike Java or RealPlayer. The plugin then detects keywords and renders them as special links to the provider's pages (either directly to a third party page, or to another page with lists of "related" links).

The user installs the plugin, so in a sense, it's their own fault. Problem is that they are promised one thing, but now they're getting something very different from what they expected.