Smart Tags!
Created | Updated Jul 11, 2003
Intrepid Post Reporter Vegiman pointed us in the direction of a new idea being mooted by Microsoft. They want to 'piggyback' their own selected content on top of your own work.
The general idea seems to be that their products, such as 'Internet Explorer' or 'Office Suite', will scan web pages and your personal documents for phrases or keywords pinpointed by Microsoft. Discovery of a suitable word or phrase would lead to it being underlined with a special mark to show that they are 'Smart Tags'. Anyone viewing the page could then click on the smart tag and be magically transported to a Microsoft web site relevant to the 'tagged' word.
As an example if you were writing about 'The Rockies' you would be linked to a travel site where you could purchase tickets to visit the area.
Why, you may ask, would Microsoft want to do this? For the money of course. It is an easy way to attract advertisers who would be prepared to pay vast amounts of money if they knew that every time a keyword was used on the internet they would be provided with a guaranteed link to their services.
The tags would be added automatically, without having to gain the permission of the author or webmaster... not strictly illegal as the law stands at the moment, but certainly rude and unethical. Weeks of work to craft a website suddenly rendered useless by the addition of unsightly and, probably, unwelcome links taking the visitor away from the original site into unknown realms.
Inappropriate links could also be a problem. Not everyone who writes a page about, for example, their interest in spiders would support a link to a place which sold terrariums for keeping them caged or to specialist import shops which sell Black Widow Spiders.
True, the tags will be 'opt-out', so site owners will have the option of removing them... but how many actually bother to do this? An 'opt-in' scheme would be far more preferrable, giving webmasters and site builders the option of taking the scheme up rather than having to 'take it down'... there are metatags available which can free each page from the unwanted smart tags, but has to be used for every single page!
Microsoft have been attacked from all sides about their 'smart tags' policy. As if ever the case, most see it as a blatent attempt to generate even more revenue from the users of their products. Smart Tags Two looks at the facts in more detail and offers a personal opinion.
