While the idea in itself is not bad, this article at ZDNet should give you a good demonstration of why you should NOT want Microsoft (or any other company) to have such power to figuratively “modify” a web page. I place the links I want on my pages; I don’t want any particular company to automatically add links for me.

My intention is to use the META tag, once (if) Microsoft announces it, to disable Smart Tags on my web pages.

If I get the time, I’ll add more to this once things settle down a little.

2001-06-25
Brief update. Apparently the meta tag is:

    <meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE">

Wikipedia
The home page of Wikipedia says “We’re writing a complete encyclopedia from scratch, collaboratively. We started work in January 2001. We’ve got over 6,000 pages already. We want to make over 100,000. So, let’s get to work! Write a little (or a lot) about what you know.” Wikipedia is implemented via WikiWiki, which allows anyone to post content. Every page has the link “You can edit this page right now!“, and they mean it. Some are detailed and extensive, while others are just comments or bare outlines waiting for someone to expand them. This is a fascinating site—you really should check it out. Set your Wikipedia preferences to enable the Random Page[new window] link. I’ve put it on my browser’s Links bar so I can jump right into it.

Nupedia
If that’s too wild for you, check out Nupedia, whose home page says “We are building the world’s largest international, peer-reviewed encyclopedia. It is free.” The about page goes on to say “Nupedia is a new online encyclopedia. It will be searchable, and also organized hierarchically and alphabetically. Nupedia is “open content”; we want the contents of the encyclopedia to receive the widest possible distribution. Reading Nupedia.com will always be free of charge.”

fixed link rot; Nupedia (defunct) link now goes to Wikipedia article [2005-03-27]
fixed link rot; Wikipedia changed underlying software [2002-02-28]

2008-05-29: disabled comments and pings/trackbacks because 90% of my spam comments are for this post

While wandering around the web I stumbled into an ASL (American Sign Language) dictionary. Every page had both this banner and this popup, saying “You have 1 message waiting for you.” with a rapidly flickering, bright yellow triangle with an exclamation point superimposed on the left side of the images. It was the pop-up that got to me. That’s right, every one of the pages I checked (not many—I couldn’t stand it) had both the banner and the popup.

At first I wasn’t going to link to the site, but I changed my mind; so, I went back to the site to verify the link, only to have my laptop lock up. Arrrgh! Anyway, after I rebooted and was yet again insulted by ScanDisk’s implication that I’m too stupid to know how to shut down properly, I finally tried the site again (hmmm, maybe SD’s on to something after all). No popup this time, and the text on the banner had rotated to a new message, like “Your modem’s too SLOW!” or something similar. Who know’s what you’ll see if you go there; maybe you should just stay away.

Ah. But I really started this entry to provide a link to Categories of Free and Non-Free Software, which is “… a glossary of various categories of software that are often mentioned in discussions of free software. It explains which categories overlap or are part of other categories.” There is also a nice diagram.

Do the right thing — switch to Linux (or some flavor of BSD, or some other open OS) wherever you can.