National Clueless Radio

This month's "Idiot Lawyers Who Don't Use The Internet" award goes to National Public Radio, for not merely insisting people link to only their home page, but requiring permission in advance to link to any page on their site.

These lawyers are so small minded. I mean, why stop at just asserting you can't link without permission. Go for the gold, I say, and state that any web site that links to your pages must pay $10,000. You could go through your referrer logs and send out bills. No more pledge drives! Instead of lawyers, you'll need collection people, and they are much cheaper, and usually more pleasant than lawyers. And don't forget, bookmarks are a form of link too, so those are billable.

I'd do the "pay per link" policy myself, but I actually crave links more than cash. So I promise you inbound links to Nosuch will always be free. Hell, I might even pay you to link to me. But some of us understand the value of an inbound link, and other people don't.

If you can just write a policy on your web page, and dictate how the world should work, be bold. How about any time someone even writes "NPR" in any form, they must pay a fee of one million dollars? (Remember to say "one million dollars" a la Dr. Evil style.) And of course it can be retroactive. Think of the revenue!

On the flip side, I think we should do exactly what they want, and not link to them. No one should link to them at all. Perhaps they should disconnect their web server from the Internet, and start the NPR-net. Then they'd have exactly what they want. Their own little network, completely under their control. They'd save tons of money on bandwidth.

Sad as I am to do this, since it seems like it's a monthly exercise, it's time to update the policies here at Nosuch:

Global Legal Terms of Use
The information contained and accessed on this site (the "Site") is provided by the owner of the Site ("Mr. Nosuch") for general guidance and amusement and is intended to offer the user general information of interest and entertainment. Due to demanding nature of maintaining the Site, Mr. Nosuch is required to charge an email processing fee for any of the following entities: KPMG, and Starbucks, Belo, The Dallas News and NPR (the "Clueless"). This fee is $10,000 per e-mail, and includes email sent to any address in the nosuch.org domain from any domain owned or operated by the Clueless or its affiliates, or email sent in any official capacity from the Clueless or its duly charged agents. The receipt of any such email constitutes acceptance of these terms.

Do feel free to adopt this policy for your own website.

posted 6:35 PM | link |