loose wire blog

Still Sneaky After All These Years

I still retain the capacity to get bummed out by the intrusiveness of software from companies you’d think would be trying to make us happy these days, not make us madder.

My friend Scotty, the Winpatrol watchdog, has been doing a great job of keeping an eye on these things. The culprits either try to change file associations or add a program to the boot sequence, without telling us. Some recent examples:

Windows Live Mail, without me doing anything at all, suddenly tried to wrest control of my emails by grabbing the extension EML from Thunderbird:

This was unconnected to anything I was doing, or had asked. I didn’t even know I still had Live Mail installed. Shocking. Imagine if I hadn’t been asking Scotty to keep guard? Or that I didn’t have much of a clue what I was doing? (OK, don’t answer that one.)

(Just out of interest, launching Outlook Express will do the same thing:)

Still, I suppose the Microsoft defence is that everyone else is doing it. I installed WordPerfect Office the other day and found that, without asking, it tried to take over handling DOC files without asking first. Luckily, Scotty woofed a warning:

No wonder users are baffled about what is going on with their computer and end up heading off to the Apple Store for some TLC. Software companies have got to stop doing this kind of thing. (And no, I’m not saying that Apple are any better at this. It’s just they reduce the choices so people feel their computers behave more predictably. This, after all, is what people yearn for.)

Likewise with starting programs. Once again it’s about predictability: If software starts loading without the user being asked first, then a) the computer is going to slow down and b) the user will have a bunch of new icons and activities to figure out. A couple of examples:

Windows Live forces its Family Safety Client to boot without asking:

as does eFax, the online faxing service:

These companies need to stop this. They need to stop it now. Consumer confidence is low, but so is user confidence. I am inundated with letters from readers of the columns who talk about their bafflement and sense of alienation from their computer. (Meanwhile, I read love stories from those who switch to Macs.) The point is this: Not that people believe Macs are better computers—although they may well be—but they are simpler to use, more predictable, more understandable, more, well, user-friendly.

What’s user-friendly about changing the settings on someone’s computer without asking them? Would a company try that with someone’s car, fridge, or dishwasher?

Software, Slowly, Gets Better

Is it just me, or are software developers beginning to get their users? For a long time I’ve felt the only real innovation in software has been in online applications, Web 2.0 non-apps—simple services that exist in your browser—but now it seems that ordinary apps are getting better too.

Evernote, I feel, is one that’s really leading the charge. They’ve taken the feedback that us users have been giving them and have added, incremental release by incremental release, some really cool features. For example: now you can save searches in the Windows version. Reminds me of the old Enfish Tracker Pro, whose departure I still mourn. In fact, Evernote isn’t far off becoming a real database instead of a dumping ground for things you’ll read one day. Maybe.

Skype, too, have pulled their socks up. I hated 4.0  beta, not least for its big bumbling footprint. But the new version is better—a lot better. The main improvement is the option to make it look like your old Skype. But it has some nice new touches, including a chronology scroller that might interest Evernote’s legal department (Skype on the left, Evernote on the right):

Move the bar on the right and you can move easily through old chats. Legal niceties aside, I think this kind of innovation is great to see, and almost restores my faith in designers realising that we don’t just use software in the here and now, but also as repositories of past heres and nows, if you know what I mean.

In short, our decision to commit to software is largely based on how much we will be able to get out of it. Not just in terms of hours saved in what we do now, but in what past information we’ll be able to get out of it. We have been using computers long enough now to have built up a huge repository of interactions and memos, and we want, nay we insist, to be able to get that stuff back. Quickly and easily. And, increasingly, to be able to move it to other places should we wish.

Google understands this relatively well. A chat in GTalk, for example, can be readily accessed via Gmail. And, now, we can also see and search our other data held within Google’s silos, right within Gmail, via some widgets from Google’s Gmail Labs. Here are two widgets that let you view your calendar:

and here’s one to see your documents within Google Docs:

Note the window at the top for searching through your document titles. This means one less step to access your data.

All these things have some basic concepts in common:

As I’ve mentioned, it’s about being able to get what you’ve put in out. Skype have listened to their customers and realised it’s less about the interface and more about the information the interface gives access to. If they were smart they’d find an easy way to send old chats to your email account or at least make it easy to search all your chats from one box. (I’m told that, or something like it, is coming in the ‘Gold’ version of  Skype 4.0 next year. Until now only group chats—three or more people can be saved to your contact list.)

Secondly, software should, where possible, work with other people’s software. Emusic’s new download manager (above), for example, does something that has been missing ever since the service launched. Previously, if you wanted to include MP3 files you’d bought from the service in iTunes, you’d need to either drag them across into iTunes or re-introduce the folder into iTunes. The new version of the downloader tool now synchronizes automatically with iTunes, meaning you don’t need to do anything. Thank God for that.

There are tons of other things that software needs to do that it presently doesn’t. I could start listing them but I need to go to bed. But maybe in this downturn developers could take a note from some of these examples, and use the time to look more carefully at what users need, at how they use your software, and explore new and better ways for them to use it for what they do, not what you think they should do.

Technorati Tags: skype,usability,evernote,gmail,google,google docs,google calendar,emusic,gui,interface,productivity

Is New Media Ready for Old Media?

I’m very excited by the fact that newspapers are beginning to carry content from the top five or so Web 2.0/tech sites. These blogs (the word no longer seems apt for what they do; Vindu Goel calls them ‘news sources’) have really evolved in the past three years and the quality of their coverage, particularly that of ReadWrite Web, has grown in leaps and bounds. Now it’s being carried by the New York Times.

A couple of nagging questions remain, however.

1) Is this old media eating new media, or new media eating the old? On the surface this is a big coup for folk like ReadWriteWeb—which didn’t really exist three years ago—but look more closely, and I suspect we may consider this kind of thing as the beginning of the acknowledgement by old media that they have ceded some important ground that they used to dominate. This, in short, marks the recognition of traditional media that theses news sources are, to all intents and purposes, news agencies that operate on a par with, and have the same values as, their own institutions.

2) Is new media ready for old media? I have a lot of respect for ReadWriteWeb, and most of the other tech sites included in this new direction. But they all need to recognise that by participating with old media they need to follow the same rules. There’s no room for conflicts of interest here: Even the NYT has reported on potential conflicts of interest for Om Malik and Michael Arrington (here’s a great piece from The Inquistr about the issue, via Steve Rubel’s shared Google Reader feed.)

The thing with conflicts of interest is that they’re tough. It’s hard to escape them. And it’s not enough to disclose them. You have, as a writer (let’s not say journalist here, it’s too loaded a word, like blogger), a duty to avoid conflicts of interest. Your commitment as a writer has to be to your reader. If your reader doesn’t believe that you’re writing free of prejudice or favor, then you’re a hack. And I don’t mean that in a nice way.

Which means you have to avoid not only all conflicts of interest, but appearances of conflict of interest. Your duty is not just to disclose conflicts of interest, and potential conflicts of interest, but to avoid them. If that means making less money, then tough.

So, for these ‘news sources’, the issue is going to become a more central one. Of course, the question will grow larger as these outfits move mainstream. But it may become more pressing for the carrier of the news, not for the provider: Who, say, accepts responsibility for errors and conflicts of interest? NYT and The Washington Post, or the carriers of the news? I’m sure there will be lots of caveats in the small print, but if material is on the NYT website, I think a reader would assume it reflects that paper’s ethical standards. If you’re in doubt, think of the recent United Airlines case.

That story’s reappearance started on Google News, and then was picked up by Income Securities Advisors, a financial information company, which was then picked up by Bloomberg. The technical error was Google’s, in finding it on a newspaper website and miscategorising it  as new, but the human error was in the ‘news source’, which saw it and then fired it off to their service, which is distributed via Bloomberg. Who is to blame for that mess? Well, the focus is all on Google, but to me the human element is the problem here, namely the reporter/writer who failed to double check the source/date etc of the piece itself.

The bottom line? It’s great that old media are recognising the quality of new media. What I want to see is this rising tide lifting all boats. Old media needs to not only grab at these news sources out of desperation but learn from their ingenuity, easy writing style and quality, and these outfits need—or at least some of them need—to take a cue from old media, take a look long and hard at themselves and ask themselves whether they could serve their readers better by shedding all conflicts—real, potential, or perceived—of interest.

Babylon? Oh So 1999

I used to think that small programs that sat in your computer's memory and could be accessed quickly by a keystroke were the future, but nowadays I'm not sure that's true. At least, they've got to be real careful. If they're not, they end up looking and behaving dangerously like adware.

An example that steers dangerously close is Babylon. Once a service with great promise, and still used by at least one of my friends, Babylon offers access to all sorts of online content -- dictionaries, thesaurii, Wikipedia entries -- just by highlighting a word in any application and hitting a couple of keys. A wonderful idea, and, with so much great reference material online, something that should by now have come into its own. But the experience falls short.

Install the software and you immediately get a pop-up suggesting you buy the product. It's strange how out of sync that sort of behaviour is in today's more demanding, less patient world. And while the information Babylon retrieves for you is impressively large, it's probably too large to be useful. Nowadays we need surgical strikes on information, not carpet bombing.

Given it's supposed to be a writer's and browser's tool, the occasional pop-up balloon from the system tray doesn't help either. I don't want programs blitzing me with reminders that the program is there, or that I am still using a trial version. This behaviour is, frankly, so 1999 it's not funny.

Needless to say, I uninstalled the software within ten minutes. Or at least I tried to: Babylon has a few more tricks up its sleeve to make sure that isn't as painless as installing it.

First off, there's no uninstall shortcut in the Start menu, only the application that sits proudly alone outside a folder:

This approach--not putting a shortcut inside a folder along with an uninstall link--always strikes me as the refuge of the pompous and delusional. Microsoft does it; Adobe does it; Real does it. They could just about get away with it. Everyone else is kidding themselves.

So, it's to the Add or Remove Programs folder, which, under XP, always takes so long to load it gives you time to wonder why you haven't switched to a Mac already. And there, one finds two more surprises from Babylon:

Firstly, there are two entries, not one in the list:

Interesting. I don't recall for a while coming across a program thinking it carried that kind of weight. More pumped up self-importance, I fear.

That's not the end of the fun. Click on the first of these and instead of the usual confirmation box about uninstalling, you're given one last chance to cough up:

I'm pretty sure that breaks all sorts of user design rules. It's annoying: Why would someone who had gotten this far in uninstalling suddenly say to themselves "Doggone it! What was I thinking? Why don't I just buy the thing instead?" By now I'm regretting even downloading Babylon to start with. All I wanted, for Chrissakes, was a decent Thesaurus.

The truth is that software has now learnt to fit better to the way we work, and not to intrude in the way that Babylon does. Look at browser widgets or the Mac's Spotlight, or even Answers.com's 1-Click Answers. Luckily, perhaps, Babylon's lack of manners stands out because it's just not how programs are written these days.

Technorati Tags: widgets, babylon, answers, wikipedia, popups, adware

When Good Things Fail

(Update at bottom of post)

I'm never quite sure what to do when something I've raved about in previous columns fails on me. Do I trumpet its failure to the world immediately? Do I go through the normal customer service channels to get it fixed, or do I raise hell with their PR to ensure it gets sorted out by the best and the brightest techies they've got available? Do I keep quiet, assuming it's a one-off?

Here's the latest mishap: My Olympus DS-20 digital recorder died. Just like that. No warning, no long walk in the rain, no circumferentially advantaged person sitting on it. One minute it was fine, the next it wasn't. No power, no sign of a flicker, nothing. And I'd only had it for about 14 months. Barely used it, actually (was supposed to be for my Loose Wireless podcasting project,which, ironically enough, was about to start an hour after I discovered the thing didn't work.) I had recently installed some rechargable batteries in it, approved by the manual.

The thing, well actually three things, are:

• I've long sung Olympus' praises in this field. This was the fourth Olympus I've had; so what happens if someone reads one of my columns or blogs saying how good they are, when it turns out they aren't?
• Now that it's gone bad on me, it's not enough for it to be fixed. How can I sing its praises even if it is fixed?
• More importantly, how can I ever rely on it or anything like it again?
• Besides, I can't really afford to go buying digital recorders willynilly. Do I look like the kind of person who can?

So, I'm troubled. I'm doubly troubled that there's no PR person that I can find online at Olympus who might be able to take a good look at this situation and see whether my problem is an easy one to fix (maybe I'm forgetting to do something like turn it on, or look at it from a certain angle) and whether this is something they've noted a lot of (I notice the DS-20 is no longer being sold. Why?)

So, for the moment I'm rescinding all recommendations for Olympus digital recorders until I sort this out. It's not that I don't think they're great; it's just that I can't be sure whether what happened to me isn't going to be happening to other people's. Given that the recordings are stored in flash memory, this is not the sort of gadget you can afford to have die on you at key moments in your life.

In the meantime I'm going to try to find a PR person to offer some insight on this.

Update Jan 21 2008: Olympus tell me the mainboard has died on the device and it would cost me US$125 to have it replaced. Since it's possible to buy a new one for less than $100 (here, for example) I'm going to decline the offer. I'm also seeking an investigation from Olympus as to why this might have happened. Things do break, and this sort of thing happens. But I'm concerned that this happened without me actually doing anything the manual said I could do, and before I write glowingly about Olympus digital recorders again or recommend them to friends, I'm hoping to get some insight about what happened and whether it's likely to happen to other people.

Technorati Tags: olympus, digital recorders, audio, problems

The Worm and Tide Turn

It's funny how things have changed. Before the days of the web, if someone offered you something for free you'd be all grovelly and the offerer would be all haughty. Like watching those matrons jostling and bashing each other with handbags at the Christmas sales, the sales assistants standing by assessing their nails.

Now, at least online, we're frustrated and angry if things don't work out the way we like, even if we aren't paying for it. When Facebook had the effrontery to start trying to make some money from us we all went ballistic, including moi. Of course, that was partly about privacy, and about ownership. We are gradually becoming aware that everything revolves around our desire to spend, and so, finally, the customer is king. Or at least our data is.

We are slowly waking up to the fact that everything that is pitched to us as a reward is actually a lure: a customer "loyalty" card (loyalty by whom to whom? The company to the consumer? I think not). And a freebie is often a pair of handcuffs in disguise: A free TV when you sign up for a 24 month contract? (Try saying no to the TV but yes to a 12 month contract instead.

The truth is that we are being increasingly mined for our proclivities, and in so doing are being swamped by a cornucopia of gifts in the hope that we'll give up some of our secrets. The web is the purest version of this: Every Web 2.0 service that has been launched has been free, or, at least partly free. I can't think of one genuine Web 2.0 (and I don't mean the faux Web 2.0 offerings, which try to look and feel like Web 2.0 but, like 40-year old men wearing sneakers and jeans cut a little too trendily for their age, give themselves away easily.

Swamped by this pile of freebies, our time becomes the most precious commodity to us. We realise we are in the ascendant and can flit easily from one service to another because so many exist and because we have to reach quick decisions about whether any merit our attention. Given this, you'd think that Web 2.0 services would be really careful about that initial experience (what folk like HP call the OOTBE -- the out of the box experience.)

But it's not always so. One service I signed up for wouldn't accept the first password it sent me; I had to reset it and then it worked (my message to their support team went unanswered.) A second, webAsyst, wouldn't recognise its own CAPTCHA codes:

it told me, only to admonish me:

There are two lessons here.

Web 2.0 is about speed. The interface -- large fonts, interesting colors, fast loading pages or AJAX -- is all about matching the speed of our online lives. So these obstacles undermine those efforts. Get that first impression right, because we won't hang around.

Web 2.0 is also about user friendliness. If something doesn't work, give the user some options about how to fix it, and, if you can, concede that it may be your own poor coding at fault rather than the poor user. In the webAsyst case, all the usual rules are broken:

• the CAPTCHA doesn't work.
• the error message doesn't have an OK button or anything to indicate what I might do next.
• there's no way to refresh the CAPTCHA to give me a different set of numbers to try (yes I tried replacing the 0 with an O with the same result.)

The result? I don't bother with webAsyst anymore and I smell a 40 year-old man struggling to look cool in a 20 year-old's getup.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, webasyst, facebook, first impressions

Everyone Wants To Be a Player

Still the big players don't get it. Still they drive people like me nuts, and confuse ordinary users, with their sly tactics that confound and bewilder.

Above, for example, Microsoft's Windows Media Player provides a list of files that it will play by default. All are checked automatically, including DVD video, midi files, WAV files and MP3 files. Nowhere is there a button for deselecting all of them. Weirdly, at the top is a message that says

Window Media Player 9 Series will be the default player for the file types that are selected in the following list. You must be logged on as administrator or a member of the Administrators group to change these settings.

Microsoft's way of confusing users who think this is something that they can't control, and intimidating them into not trying. Nowhere does it say "You can uncheck these boxes if you like; of course you'll have to do it one by one, which we're hoping you won't have time to do." (I timed it; it took about 10 seconds. That's ten seconds of my life I'm not going to get back.)

RealPlayer is notorious for this kind of thing. I installed it the other day. The Media Types window, steers the unsuspecting user to signing away all their rights with a big obvious option and one lesser option:

If you are stupid enough to ignore that, you can try figuring out which files you want RealPlayer to deal with, which of course, has everything checked by default:

There is, however, an "Deselect all" button. And alongside each format is a helpful note about what software that file type is currently assigned to. Their sneaky trick, however, is to hide the important one, the reason you presumably installed the player, so that you have to scroll down below the visible list to find the Real file types. There's no button marked "Just let the Player handle the things it's supposed to handle, and leave me alone, OK?"

Actually, this whole thing is a kind of battle, a bit like the default browser battle. Everybody seems to play the same game, with varying degrees of sneakiness/sleaziness. Back in the Preferences window of RealPlayer is a checkbox that lets RealPlayer fight back, in case you've decided against allowing it to play everything. Although in its defence, the first time it notices you've left the reservation, you get a warning, which says "RealPlayer is no longer the default player for some audio and video files:

Still, the wording is sufficiently cheeky to confuse the more casual user: "Do you want to keep RealPlayer," it asks, as the default player for these file types?"

I like the word "keep" instead of "revert" or "return". Most users are conservative. They don't want to change things. RealPlayer execs probably sat in an office all afternoon thinking about the wording to that little message. This message will keep popping up, by the way, each time you change one of these file types until you tell it to stop.

Window Media Player, meanwhile, is a bit weirder. Windows' file system will acknowledge that control of the file type has passed hands, but WMP won't. Instead, in the file types options window, the checkbox will be ticked but "dimmed":

The help file helpfully says:

If a selected check box is dimmed, Windows Media Player has only partial ownership of the file type. Multiple file extensions are assigned to the file type, but the Player only plays some of those extensions by default. To give the Player full ownership of a file type, double-click the dimmed check box.

I've read that second sentence a couple of times, and still don't know what it means. But to me the implication is clear: It's virtually impossible for Windows Media Player to surrender all rights to a file type unless you actually uncheck the right box in the options window. And you may notice that the only way into the options window is through a menu that can only be accessed on the default Windows Media Player skin by a little arrow in the left hand corner:

The bottom line: I can understand that control of media is valuable real estate for these guys, but I really feel for the poor folk who are trying to just play music, or videos or whatever. There must be a better way of doing this.

Technorati Tags: windows xp, microsoft, media players, defaults, realplayer

A Tip off the Old Block

Chris "Long Tail" Anderson fires off at PR with both barrels, blocking unsolicited press releases and naming-and-shaming those who sent them:

Everything else gets banned on first abuse. The following is just the last month's list of people and companies who have been added to my Outlook blocked list. All of them have sent me something inappropriate at some point in the past 30 days. Many of them sent press releases; others just added me to a distribution list without asking. If their address gets harvested by spammers by being published here, so be it--turnabout is fair play.

It's not a bad response, albeit a tad unfair to not give due warning: The list includes identifiable individuals, whose comments should be solicited prior to publication. But it is definitely a problem for us journos, and his list does reveal those PR agencies that are most egregious in this regards: 5wpr.com, webershandwick.com, techmarket.com (not heard of them) and sspr.com. I've had problems with at least one of these and have set up a filter to dump anything from that domain into a junk folder since I get so many follow-up emails it's dizzying.

The problem here is sloppy, generic email blasts rather than carefully targeted emails. ("Dear X, here's a press release you may be interested in", compared with "Dear Jeremy, I know you've written on this subject before, but that was 18 months ago and I thought this announcement by our client may possibly offer a fresh angle on the topic").

It's not that we don't need press releases, it's that we need the right ones. And the more we're sent, the less time we have to find that nugget. PR folk don't seem to get this; one recently apologized that she couldn't separate out the ones that matched my interests and so asked me to bear with receiving all of them. Needless to say all of them now are sent to my junk folder so in effect I'm not getting any.

The best way for both sides to get something out of each other is, in my view, simple. Journalists (and bloggers) set up a page that explains, in detail, what their interests are (mine is here.) PR pitches get a stock response: "please check my PR page for what I'm interested in. Future releases that don't match these interests will be blocked, along with further traffic from this address."

The Long Tail: Sorry PR people: you're blocked

Technorati Tags: pr, public relations, spam, wired, chris anderson, journalism

Turn It Off, Turn It On Again

Having spent the best part of a day trying to do something very basic, and yet failing, here's another public service announcement for anyone having problems connecting their router, wireless or otherwise, to a cable modem:

• If you have a cable Internet connection, but only through one computer, and nothing seems to correct the problem, you probably need to unplug the ethernet cable from your computer and turn off your cable modem.
  
• Turn it off. Leave it off for a minute, and then turn it back on again. Reconnect the cable.
  
• Chances are it will now connect. If it doesn't, either you didn't leave it turned off long enough, or something more sinister is afoot. But it worked for me.
  

Now, I know this is stupid of me not to think of, but in my defence I was out of sorts:

• the modem was new, the setup was new, and I didn't have a lot of faith in my Netgear WiFi Travel Router, mainly because I hadn't used it for cable modem-ing. Nowhere in all the set-up palaver did it mention turning off your cable modem.
  
• So I dashed off to buy a Linksys WRT54GC something or other. The installation CD wouldn't run on my laptop, so I downloaded their impressive sounding troubleshooting software, EasyLink Home Networking Tools (note to self: anything with 'easy' in the name isn't).
  
• None of the EasyLink products worked for me, so I was reduced to copying the contents of the installation CD (which for some odd reason, worked fine on a Mac) to a USB drive and running the router set up from there. This is far more information than you're interested in getting, but I'm trying to show that I wasn't completely useless. This didn't work either, by the way. The Linksys software just sits there like a useless lemon telling you that it's not connecting. (Another note to self: The term " wizard" for installation and troubleshooting software is vastly overused. Of course, they don't take into account turnips like me, but they pretend they do. I don't know which is worse.)
  
• I have a Mac sitting around looking pretty, so I thought I'd give Mr Jobs a chance. He was no better. Couldn't connect, but neither did he offer the sort of sage, grounded advice I'd expected: "Turn stuff off and turn them on again." I guess, once again, Mac dudes are too smart for that kind of trash talk.
  
• Finally I called up the guys who installed the modem, got bounced through a voice menu, until a sweet, albeit automated, voice said "If you're having problems installing a router to your cable modem, switch off the modem first. Then reconnect. Have a nice day." And hung up.
  
• Now one final point: the modem in question doesn't actually have an off/on switch. Or a reset switch. And nowhere in the manual could I find the words: "From time to time you may feel the need to switch the modem off and on again, to see whether that helps. Good idea. It might. We don't know why exactly. If we did, we'd have mentioned it, and put an on/off switch in. But we felt that by putting one in that might have implied our products were not as cool as we like to think they are, so we haven't put one in. Please don't throw this manual or the modem across the room in frustration at hours of wasted productivity because this fact was not mentioned, as that voids warranty." So I switched off the modem, counting to 20 in Thai, just because I can, and turned it on again.
  

So the little sweet-sounding lady was right. It all worked like a dream after that. So the moral of the story is: Don't assume anything on the part of the products you're testing. Just because your cable modem -- or any other appliance -- doesn't actually have an on/off or reset switch doesn't mean you shouldn't try to turn it off. In fact turn everything off once or twice. Who knows, everything might work better that way.

Tags: guide, modem, internet, broadband, netgear, singapore, linksys

The Sleazy Practice of Internal Linking

It's a small bugbear but I find it increasingly irritating, and I think it reflects a cynical intent to mislead on the part of the people who do it, so I'm going to vent my spleen on it: websites which turn links in their content, not to the site itself, but to another page on their own website.

An example: TechCrunch reviews Helium, a directory of user-generated articles. But click on the word Helium, and it doesn't take you, as you might reasonably expect, to the website Helium, but to a TechCrunch page about Helium. If you want to actually find a link to the Helium page, you need to go there first.

I find this misleading, annoying and cynical on the part of the websites that do this. First off, time-honored tradition of the net would dictate a website name which is linked to something would be to the website itself. Secondly, clearly TechCrunch and its ilk are trying to keep eyeballs by forcing readers to go to another internal page, with all the ads, before finding the link itself. Thirdly, because I'm a PersonalBrain user and I like to drag links into my plex (that's what we PBers call it) it's a pain.

Fourthly, it's clearly a policy that even TechCrunch has trouble enforcing. In the case above, the original post had the word Helium directly linking to the website itself, but which was subsequently edited to link to the internal TechCrunch page (as noticed by a reader of the site). If you subscribe to the TechCrunch feed, that's what you'll still see:

 

TechCrunch isn't alone in this, by the way. StartupSquad does it (a particularly egregious example here of five links in a row which don't link to the actual sites). For an example of how it should be done, check out Webware, which has the word linking to the site itself, and an internal review as a parenthetical link following. Like this, in Rafe Needleman's look at companionship websites. Click on Hitchsters and you go to the site; click on 'review' and you go to a review.

It's a nuisance more than a crime, but to me it still undermines a central tenet of the web: links should be informative and not misleading. If you are linking to anything other than what your reader would expect, then you're just messing around with them.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, techcrunch, internet practice, ethics, etiquette