[thelist] RE: link spam a new spam

[ANDREA STREIGHT]

You've heard of email spam, and comment spam, some may know of trackback 
spam and RSS feed spam.

Now there's a new deceptive spam-like practice, that I'm loosely labeling 
"link spam" for lack of a better term. I just discovered it two minutes ago, 
but I thought I'd mention it and see what others have to say about it.

What is "link spam"?

You're reading an article on a subject of interest to you, in my case it was 
Seniors and Internet Dangers.

I see a blue underlined hypertext link. When I hover my cursor over it, lo 
and behold, the link destination is totally unexpected, and basically 
undesirable. The destination has nothing to do with the article or what I'm 
researching.

So the blue underlined hypertext link is a blatant violation of user 
expectations and the philosophy of linking in general.

The link is deceptive, because an entity (person, URL, organization, fact) 
is mentioned in a sentence, so I assume that the hypertext link will lead to 
information related to the topic of the article and the sentence. WRONG!

A "Sponsored Link" box pops up upon hover state, and it's just like a 
sponsored link in a search engine result page, with a headline, a paragraph 
of description, and a blue underlined hypertext link.

This is not good. This is destructive of hypertext linking, very deceptive 
and annoying. Not saying it is criminal or immoral, just a very bad 
practice.

This is not a "rant." This is a warning, and a plea to not imitate this 
troubling development.

I will give you the location where I first encountered this whole new 
species of spam:

www.bizreport.com/news/7968/

I wonder what reactions I'll get to this?



Steven Streight
Web Usability Analyst/Web Artist
astreight at msn.com
vaspersthegrate at yahoo.com
www.vaspersthegrate.blogspot.com
www.streightsite.blogspot.com
www.arttestexplosion.blogspot.com