About.com Fail

blog.majesticseacreature.com

14 points·sandal··7 comments

I know this sort of thing is par for the course in terms of corporate blogging, but I just felt the need to share my feelings as a content creator in hopes that companies understand their actions effect real people, not just ad click-through rates. (Hah, good luck with that, right?)

I think this issue would come to the fore front' with an example where you surf to all these places, and let the top bar ads pile up - then screen shot it ...

- the campaigns slogan "If we all acted like Digg and About.com"

- If this keeps happening I think a frame buster will soon become something that is automatic, which will break things that use it for the good of the internet (Google cache)

About the campaign:

Ahahaha, someone please do that! It'd be awesome :)

About framebusting:

Yeah, it sucks to break some good uses of framing. Anyone know of a service out there that does busting based only on a list of known abusive URLs? That sounds like something that would be useful...

About.com has been doing this for years. If you don't want anyone to link to your content, don't post it on the Internet.

There is a difference between linking and putting an obnoxious panel with flash banners in it onto a page without any clear indication that the content below it is not affiliated with about.com.

Did you read the second latest 43folders.com article? It's a good write-up about the whole issue.

http://www.43folders.com/2009/04/10/free-me

Thanks for posting this link. I hadn't seen it before, and it really does hit the nail on the head.

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