I thought I posted this in the past, but the ASL Browser has video clips of many American Sign Language expressions, including numbers 1-10.

Enjoy!

I've heard a lot about Google Toolbar's Autolink feature, and here are my thoughts on the entire matter.

I have no issue with people reformatting the layout of my page, for your own viewing - go ahead, zoom in, use readers, tweak out my CSS (to remove, or add, underlines under the links, read it in an RSS reader, whatever. Change the appearance all you want, if it makes it easier to read my content. Even with HTML itself I have no way of really enforcing consistency between browsers - no matter what I do, what CSS tags I write, the pages will be rendered slightly differently on each browser and OS.

Now, people changing my content, that's what ticks me off.

Don't put words, or links, in my mouth that I didn't say. Links are content too. There are certain things I don't like to on this page - either because I've already linked to it earlier in the story, because there's no official site, or because I don't want to encourage certain behavior. (Yes, perhaps that makes me a fascist. What would make me more of a fascist is that if I prevented you from searching these things out for yourself - I don't block you going to google and searching for D&D, when I mentioned it a few entries ago, for example.)

The only way I might be ok with something like Autolink is that if it redirected you to a google search first. You click on an autolinked thing, and now you have a Google search result page. On the other hand, I don't have any say whatsoever on what Google links to, and now, suddenly I've got my words associated with this third party. When I choose to link to something, I know exactly where that link is going, at least at the moment I link to it.

There's always the possibility that a DNS name sniper will pick up the domain name I pointed to, and now it's a porn site, which is why many corporate sites have a little disclaimer under them, that they aren't responsible for outside site's content.

Which is part of the reason I hate comment spam on my work site. I hate being used to promote something I don't agree with, be it viagra, porn, or prom dresses (yes, I got comment spam for prom dresses the other day. Huh??!!). Someone leaves a legitimate comment on any of my blogs, they can point to their homepage or whatever in the comment and I don't mind. But I have a responsibly to my readers (or potential clients) to not associate myself with the riff-raff of the Internet (however I define the term... my content, my site), and this is very important to me.

A link is that badge of association, it's the Internet's way of saying, "Hey, you might be interested in those people over there, go check it out!" I'd say that it's one of the most important tags out there - without it there would be no World Wide Web. Without links there would be no way to link things together, no threads to construct the web.

Now, people linking to me, people that I may or may not agree with, isn't really under my control. It's their content, they can link to me if I want, I shouldn't stop that - but if I don't agree with them, or if they fall under the category of riff-raff of the Internet, I won't link back.

Back to the Google Toolbar thing, I don't think I would mind if ads, or links, were placed in a window that is obviously separate from the browser window. Some sort of sidebar or palette or something (preferably in a separate window)... but placing them in the middle of my content, making it look like I endorse whatever service you're linking too - even though I might not - well, puts words in my mouth.

I don't want words to be placed in my mouth, even if the user has to jump through a mouse click and a noise to get to that state. Even if Toolbar only links ISBNs, VINs, and google maps... knowing the rate at which Google adds features to its search engine, soon it will be other things.

Content providers have a responsibly to make it easy to use the information on their site - linking ISBN numbers somewhere (perhaps going to Amazon, perhaps B&N, perhaps some comparison shopping site), certainly linking VIN numbers, perhaps linking address. Content providers who don't make things like that easy may just die off anyway - someone comes out with an easier, more useful site, and much of the traffic goes there. But again, the principles of links must be maintained, as badges of association, and writers on the Internet must be able to choose who they are assocating themselves with.