all talk and no action

This is why I hate IntelliTXT: it has all the intelligence of a parsnip.

Here's a recipe at cooksrecipes.com:



The green links, you might assume, point you towards something useful and related. So the 'tomato' link is going to link to more tomato recipes or a site where you can buy tomatoes.



They don't. This one is an Amazon link offering "all the best sellers in one place" instead. Great - I can get myself some organic, vine-ripened Italian tomatoes!

But click the link and instead Amazon informs me that I may be interested in a book called I Will Not Ever Eat A Tomato. Well, not at this rate, I won't.

I think the problem with IntelliTXT or anything like it is that it breaks the important wall between editorial and advertising. It'd be hypocritical to criticise advertising generally - it pays the mortgage for thee and me, after all - but I think IntelliTXT gets the balance wrong.

It's like... there was an outcry over the ads in Lost on C4 a few weeks back, because the balance was wrong: it felt like you were getting ten minutes of ads for every ten seconds of content. IntelliTXT seems a bit like that to me - it's as if every second word, someone with a megaphone starts shouring an ad to you.

I dunno, maybe I'm being overly harsh, but I feel as if IntelliTXT is subverting the whole point of links: when you see a link in editorial you assume - as you've written - that it'll go to a definition, or a resource, or a listing of all the articles on that subject, or whatever.

It's horribly reminiscent of Smart Tags, I think, and if there isn't a Firefox plugin to kill it I'm sure one will be along soon...

*checks*

Yep, there's a script that goes into Adblock to kill it.

I feel as if IntelliTXT is subverting the whole point of links: when you see a link in editorial you assume that it'll go to a definition, or a resource, or a listing of all the articles on that subject, or whatever.

I agree. I think IntelliTXT makes Jakob Nielsen sad.

Heh. I feel a new campaign coming on :)

The let's freak Jakob out campaign ;-) I'm not going to add a rule to Adblock to block IntelliTXT, though, as I generally only block ads that turn into huge Flash animations that TAKE UP YOUR ENTIRE SCREEN. Ads in general don't bother me. And while IntelliTXT no doubt breaks all sorts of usability rules, it could have a use if the keywords were sold better: to actually link to content that's relevant to the context in which the word appears. For example, if 'getmonkey' linked to a site where you could buy monkeys, how could anyone not like that?

I'd have to agree with paul here. The first time I saw intellitext it was on a tech review article on plasma HDTVs and the words "42-inch plasma" were double-underlined. The IntelliTXT ad took me to a site where I could purchase the Hitachi plasmas. Advertising pays my mortgage as well and I've seen some surprisingly relevant IntelliTXT links from words. Maybe we are catching this type of advertising in the early stages (like looking at paid search in 2002). Remember the reactions people had to that?

It will be interesting to see how this works out as IntelliTXT grows and more advertisers participate. The flash ads and banners are the ads that bother me the most. These types of ads interrupt my session, and slow what I'm doing down. Users are smart enough to know that the double-underlines are ads and I have to wonder if it's the publishers themselves that determine how many links they put on their pages. To me this is just another way to earn revenue from free content and I'd rather have a link than a heavy flash ad any day.