After reading an entry on Instapundit, once again I am getting angry.
Apparently, Wired Magazine is reporting on a new phenomenon. Referer advertising. A couple of companies have created an advertising model where they send a false referer note in your logs saying that a user arrived to your site (blog) from another site. Actually, I've seen this long ago on Diamond Talk and wondered how someone got to, say Diamond Talk, from a porn site. It's only now that I realize it was "referer advertising".
Unfortunately, it's rather obvious what the next step will be. Trackback and Pingback advertising. These parasties will abuse the friendly nature of the net and destroy the entire protocol of pingbacks and trackbacks like they destroyed usenet.
I take that back. What will probably happen there is the designers of software supporting these protocols will have to create filters where each trackback or pingback will have the option to be moderated before it is allowed to appear on a blog.
The wired article is here.
Astute readers of Diamond Blog will recognize that the line in the article about "Some bloggers publish a list that automatically updates links to sites that have linked to them" may have been inspired by the work of a frequently cited (at DB) blogger, Mark Pilgrim, although other fine sites like plastic do the same.
In the scheme of things, I'm still far more upset by spam porn to children than fake referer advertising, although all these practices should become illegal.
Parents, there is something you can do to protect your kids. DT member Song described the steps she took. Bravo Song!
