Comments on: Yahoo Y!Q

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 03:22:49 +0000

Stuart made the comaparison of Y!Q to MS Smart Tags. Not the same. Not sure if you meant to insult Yahoo!, or complement MS. Either way, the comparison is wrong.

Yahoo does not hijack anyones page. MS did.

I can’t stand reading those Yahoo pages with the big bolded words. It is annoying. Even more annoying is that it appears if you don’t run the buggiest browswers (I.E., Firefox, etc..) to use.

Even the Chitika app is buggy when not used with insecure browsers.

Why can’t programmers code without the MS crutch? Very Lame

By: Chris @ Deliberate Chaos

Chris @ Deliberate Chaos — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 20:13:13 +0000

Wasn’t a discussion about links in posts not too long ago?

This would be something else that would pull a reader away from ones blog. I can see linking to one or two places in a post, i.e. see the news story here or here’s the item I’m discussing. But, to leaving it to an automated device that might link every three or four words in every paragraph is dangerous because it dilutes readership.

I’d rather manually link to a page or two.

Now, if there was a pay-per-click component, I might be willing to reconsider since there would compensation for losing readers to the Y!Q links.

By: Athomemama

Athomemama — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 19:03:32 +0000

I agree, once in a while is good, even useful, but the way the links are in Andy’s comment is annoying. In fact, it is one of the hardships I see when I try to read a wikipedia article. None of these are ads, but gosh are they annoying. It really breaks up the flow when every two words are hyperlinked.

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 13:44:42 +0000

Yeah, I don’t particularly like that idea, unless I can choose the words that get linked (as a publisher). For instance, if I’ve written an article about a specific video card, having that model pop up a link about that specific video card once would be fine. Having a bunch of other words pop up would be… annoying.

I’ve noticed many sites that this happens on as I roll my mouse past the words, they pop up little windows. I find this exceptionally tedious to read.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 10:27:56 +0000

Turning individual words on a web page into links – whether the designer of that web page wanted that to happen or not – was something that Microsoft were playing with a couple of years ago.

They did let that lapse but I guess it’s quite likely to come back now that Yahoo are achieving that.

There was some code available that a webmaster could insert into his header tags to prevent Microsoft hijacking various words so I wonder if there is something like that available to block Yahoo?

By: Andy Merrett

Andy Merrett — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 07:57:17 +0000

I'm not sure I like the trend towards every word in a sentence potentially being an advert. Apart from specific products, it's distracting and feels somewhat sneaky. If I am reading about an iPod, I don't mind if a text link in the article takes me to apple.com, or to a site that sells them, but if someone hotlinks the words 'MP3 player' or 'digital jukebox' to some shopping site (even one that lists products) I'd feel a little cheated, unless it was obvious (some use a little graphic to show an ad link) - but even then it can break up the flow of writing. Even worse if people start using very ordinary words. Sorry, you get the point :) (if that even gets through your spam filter!) I suppose it's another way of combatting ad blindness, but where is content allowed to be itself?