p e n g u i n d e v i l

Okay, so I see how lots of folks want to make a living with their blogs and websites, more power to them I say. So I understand the use of things like Adsense to put little ad’s on their blogs, and funny little things like what us Amazon Associates do with all the movies having links to (generally) Amazon… But I am a bit put off by this Contentlink thing. When I see a link, especially one that is both underlined and a different color, I assume that the page author put it there to tie in with their subject (see this picture, check this website, buy this movie). Now though, I am finding more and more links that are just ad’s in the blog content. Not only that, but they are hard to ignore because 1) the words linked tend to be subjects (which throws me a bit, “why is Mac a link?” and then it’s not even a link to Apple or to a Macintosh dealer, but one of those crappy generic link collection pages), and 2) they have big balloons that pop up when you mouse over them. Having a subject linked leads me to believe that I am about to click to a definition or wiki page on the matter, not some vaguely related advertisement… For instance, a link on the term “desktop publishing” that brings up an ad window for Microsoft office?

Anyway, I don’t like it. And while I’m on the subject, I can’t stand those sort of websites (like findstuff.com, which I found a contentlink to) that are “original content free”, nothing but sucked in links to other sites… I guess it had to happen once people realized that you really could make money online, but the proliferation of sites that have no content except for automatically trawled content from other sites really bugs me. It’s the WWW version of spam. As I said, I think it’s great if someone has product or content that they would like to generate some money off of, but these spam e-mails and directory sites are just annoying and lame ways for people to try and generate money in any effortless way that they can and it’s sad that they have to fill the internet with this stuff, like billboards cluttering up the highway.