Shallow Bullshit

Dallas Morning News: "If you operate a Web site and wish to link to this Site, you may link only to the home page of the Site and not to any other page or subdomain of us." [via Scripting News]

This one has been going around today thanks to a Slashdot article covering a Wired article reporting on a cease and desist letter sent to an independant community news site over deep linking.

What makes media companies believe that the world will end if they do not control every aspect of content distribution? Napster and Kazaa haven't driven the RIAA and MPAA out of business, and they never will. Ignoring the dubious legality of P2P content distribution, they ultimately expand the market. Word of mouth, viral marketing. The population as a whole has proven that they will continue to pay for things that can otherwise be had for free. Look at bottled water and the failure of Free software on the desktop...

Taking a stance against deep linking is laughable. Ignore the fact that links are the entire purpose of the web. Ignore the fact that preventing deep links is an extremely simple technical matter. Ignore common sense.

Let's look at advertising.

The Dallas Morning News thinks that deep linking costs them advertising revenue. They believe that if some writer hadn't linked to one of their articles, and some Internet user hadn't clicked on it, that user would have somehow come to their homepage of their own volition and therefore subjected themselves to a greater number of ads.

Have you ever visited the Dallas Morning News home page, prior to today?

Today the Miami-Herald served six ads to me, on a single page-view, and they have Glenn Fleishman to thank his deep link to one of their articles. The Miami-Herald may be the newspaper that I grew up with, but when I want newspaper content online I visit the SJ Merc and NY Times. If another web site doesn't point me to a newspaper article, I don't read it.

More links = more eyeballs = more advertising revenue.

Web sites supported by advertising that take a stand against deep linking do so at their own peril.

5:35:01 PM | Comments:

PDABuzz: Handspring released Treo update. Standby time is supposedly increased from 60 hours to 100. Tons of minor software updates. Full details from Handspring.

3:14:10 PM | Comments:

It turns out that the Spelling Checker API for Windows CE may not actually exist on Pocket PC devices.

11:07:08 AM | Comments:

May Day

Part of my reason for being up at this hour was to call my bank in Germany to arrange a wire transfer. Nobody answered the phone. It's amazing how quickly a former expat forgets which days are foreign holidays...

May Day is Labor Day for the rest of the world, a day to remember the labor movement that brought humane conditions to the workplace. A day to remember the people who died for that movement. Our ancestors in the Industrial Revolution had it bad.

May Day isn't a holiday in the US because it serves as yet another reminder that our nation does not have a squeaky-clean history.

5:24:59 AM | Comments:

Beta 1 v0.1.4 Released

It's still Tuesday somewhere...

See the Pocket Blog Download page.

Improvements:

"Update" button: Forces Pocket Blog to post updates and refresh it's cache immediately.

Error Handling: Some types of errors are handled better, still much room for improvement.

Several minor display bugs fixed: Thanks to Josh Puetz for reporting one of them.

Focus fixes: Pocket Blog tries to set the focus to the proper control whenever it switches screens.

Continuous polling has not been implemented in this release. Error handling needs more improvement before this feature will be ready for use. In the interim, use the "Update" button.

4:33:47 AM | Comments: