August 18, 2003
Jeff Cooper complains that he's getting comment-spam, and a quick search at Daypop suggests he's not alone. Why would advertisers think spamming blogs would gain them customers? Sounds like culture shock to me.
On a related note, I've been wondering about the etiquette of linking to photos. Is it acceptable to load a picture directly from another site without express permission? This would hardly matter for the amount of traffic I have, but hypothetically couldn't it become a serious drag on bandwidth for that other site? Just curious what people think about this.
I try to keep my hot linked photos to sites like CNN that can handle the traffic. Of course, my 14-20 hits/day have slashdotted a few sites...
I download and store the photos directly on my site, which doesn't eat their bandwidth, but almost certainly violates their copyright. I do, however, provide a link to the site from which the picture was taken. But I rationalize it away by my profit margin on apostropher being zero dollars and zero cents total revenue minus the hosting costs.
I figure if they complain, I'll take a photo down, but I'm likely too small a fry to be worth the complaint. Your mileage may vary. Shrug.
Hmmm.... it's probably not entirely kosher, but it's hard for me to imagine feeling bad about posting other people's pictures on my site, with my bandwidth, especially if they're credited. I was more concerned with this business of using the source site's bandwidth, which potentially incurs real costs for them.
Hotlinking is a pretty big no-no. Apostropher's solution is probably best.
These are declarative sentences.
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