Guys, I need a hand here.

[ibneko]

Say LiveJournal or Xanga started to search your blog's content for keywords, and added links to these keywords in order to get profit, what would your response be? Why? And how can they make the feature (or curse) better?

I'm arguing with someone who thinks we could profit out of parsing RSS feeds as we display them by adding links to various words that we find in the content. She thinks it's good. At least to make money from. I'm of the opinion that it's terribly unethical.

I've offered up the possibly options:
1) Instead of doing it for the RSS feeds, we'll do it for those who wish to post directly to our site, (a multi-blog poster, if you will) and from there, provide some sort of "preview" page, with optional links for the author to put in.

2) ...actually, that wasn't really an option.

Comments

[shanrina.livejournal.com]

No. No. No. Just...no. Well, I wouldn't care so much about Xanga because I don't have one, but if LJ started doing that...no. Bad. I have a pretty high tolerance for things that seem to drive other people crazy about the Internet (e.g., popups and ads in general), but I can't stand those. They're annoying and they distract from reading in a way that popups and regular ads don't. Honestly, the only way I can think of to make the curse better is to not do it. Blogs are journals, and links like that don't belong in people's personal journals.

OTOH, I don't really know what an RSS feed is so I might be thinking of the links in a different place than they actually are.

[ibneko.livejournal.com]

RSS feeds are essentially source-code copies of our content. You'll find an example at http://shanrina.livejournal.com/data/rss (may not read well in a web browser).

So for example, it'd turn your entry:
"I can't believe I just did what I did. Hell, I can't believe what just happened that caused me doing what I just did."
into
"I can't believe I just did what I did. Hell, I can't believe what just happened that caused me doing what I just did."

(don't actually click that link. It goes to www.Hell.com, which, uh, I don't know what's there...)

--
But something else to keep in mind, is that the content we'll be aiming for, will be reviews of places or things, so not personal things. Granted, I'm not too sure how many links to sponsors we'd be able to connect (it'd be pretty hard), so.. yeah. I don't know.

[andr00.livejournal.com]

Well, this feature is on some other user-contribution-driven places like Expert Sex Change (you can see an example of the technique at that link).

The thing is, although the words may indeed link to a relevant product, people aren't shopping when they're reading the content. They're reading. So they don't buy anything. I think it isn't even very good at making a profit.

Of course, besides profit from all those ad sales, there's a ton of profit to be made from all the people flocking to have, er, links added to their content willy-nilly. I mean, yeah. Lots of people want that. Ever.

Oh, I know. One way to make context link-sales more palatable would be to implement this: You click on a video on youTube and it plays a little movie of people making rockets out of diet coke and mentos, say, and when the diet coke or mentos are shown, they get little glowy highlights and you click on them and you get diet coke and mentos couriered to your door in 90 minutes or less!

C'mon ben.. there's thirty million dollars a year to be made in the video portal/bad idea/intellitext/kozmo implementation. You cannot resist the power of the dark side!

[ibneko.livejournal.com]

Ah, yeah, I knew I'd seen this type of thing before.

Hehe, links in a video... come to think of it, that might actually be possible: there's software out there that has the AI to recognize an object in a picture, once given enough samples. Might not be entirely strong enough though...

Feh. While making money would be nice, driving away all our users would result in a lack of money. That, and I may be too ethical to wander over onto the dark side of making money by Bad Ideas™.

[jaiwithani.livejournal.com]

Opt-in.