On Tue, Nov 09, 2010 at 08:27:01AM +0000, Philip Hands wrote: > How about making the planet disarm all links that point elsewhere than > the same domain as the blog post that contains it? Perhaps a little > too draconian? Yes, because there can be genuine reasons for doing so. E.g., when I want to post something about a picture I took, I'm not going to put that picture on my gallery site; I just don't have the bandwidth there to do so. Instead, I'll post it on flickr and include that in the blog post. And since flickr requires me to add a link to the picture page if I do that, I'll follow their terms of use and do so. Yes, that means that flickr will be able to track stuff. And? On the matter at hand: personally, I think that the current situation is not a problem. In my world view, there's a major difference between a link meant to support the author of a blog post on a voluntary basis (such as a flattr link) and an annoying animated GIF that advertises a product or website which doesn't have anything to do with the subject at hand but is shown because some computer program somewhere, based on an AI implementation that is broken by definition[1], believes it does. I am a bit annoyed by the style of Raphaël's posts, which clearly tend to be a bit "commercial" in nature -- not as in advertising products or similar, but advertising his blog as a medium, to be something that loads of people might be interested in. And though the flattr links don't help in alleviating that annoyance, they're certainly not the source of it. And as such, I don't think that blocking the flattr links will take away my annoyance. Note that this isn't meant to be personal; Raphaël's posts are not the only ones that annoy me, and he is one of a number of authors on Planet Debian whose posts I regularly skip, simply because their style just doesn't agree with me. But since Raphaël's example had already been mentioned in this discussion... I think it's just a matter of personal preference; and while it's a good thing to once in a while check whether the readership of Planet Debian still finds it to be a good medium, my vote currently would not be to change anything. [1] we don't have actual working AI yet, so anything that claims to be AI is broken by definition. -- The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters works because there's a guard with a large gun making sure no one is trying to fool the system. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html
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