TO LINK OR NOT TO LINK?

As the owner of a phone number, do you have the right to say who can and cannot call you? Now let's take the same question and apply it to the Internet. As the owner of a web site, do you have the right to say who can and cannot link to your site?

Many companies and organizations actually have a linking ban policy in place that basically says you cannot have a link on your web site that links to their web site. But does someone have the right to dictate what you can and cannot do on your very own web site that you pay for and control? Obviously you can't have anything that's against the law on your web site such as pedophilia and selling illegal drugs. But can someone tell you as a web site owner where you can and cannot link?

Before you answer, consider the flip side. As a web site owner, do you want to be able to control who can and cannot link to you? How would you feel about some undesirable web site having a link to yours? Imagine your horror discovering that some X-rated or hate group website had a prominent link to your web site. In life, your image can be greatly affected by the places in which you are seen and the kinds of people with whom you associate. Your web site is subject to those same conditions.

When it comes to your phone number, you can have it unlisted and only the people to whom you give it will be able to reach you. Or you can choose to be completely accessible with a listed number and try to screen your calls with things like Caller-ID, Call Blocking and other methods that attempt to filter out telemarketers and undesirable calls.

Similarly with your web site, you can have an unlisted address and only those who know it could link to you. Or you can choose to be completely accessible but control access by requiring a password or using some other mechanism. But these technology solutions are only a band-aid and don't really go to the heart of the matter which is determining who has what control rights.

One of the proposed solutions is to ban something called "deep linking." The idea is that you can't ban a link to your web site's home page but you can ban links to pages within your web site. That way your "front door" remains accessible to everyone on the Internet while preserving some control over what can and cannot be seen within your site. And although I think it's a step in the right direction, it still doesn't completely alleviate the guilt by association problem when your home page is listed on some kind of perverse web site.

I'm not sure if there is an answer that will satisfy every linking policy condition and I tend not to favor anything that attempts to legislate the Internet. So while this particular column doesn't offer an answer, it is my hope that it will get you thinking about the problem. In fact this linking issue has been embroiled in controversy almost as long as the commercial Web has been around.

In the meantime, don't have links on your web site that point to The American Cancer Society, The Washington Post, The City of Colorado Springs, Shell Oil, Disney and a plethora of other institutions that have publicly posted linking bans in place on their web sites. If you'd like to know who else has linking bans, you can find an ongoing list of them at Dontlink.com, a web site that's dedicated to posting institutions with web site linking bans. Dontlink.com's stance is quite clear on linking bans, referring to them as "Stupid." In fact, you can be assured your web site will be named and linked to on Dontlink.com by sending them a request not to link to your web site.

See correctly behind you

Is your computer positioned in such a way that the TV set is behind you? I'm not sure if there is any sort of study about this but I'd be willing to bet that a lot of computers in the home or office are positioned so that the TV set is at your back. One solution is to put a mirror up so you can watch the TV but the obvious problem is that everything you see is reversed. But not anymore. The "UltraView Mirror" from Clear View Innovations is a clever mirror that lets you see the reflected image with a non-reversed perspective. Using a V-shaped two mirror assembly, you look into the smaller of the two mirrors and see the correctly reflected image in the larger mirror. The UltraView is available with an adjustable table stand you can easily position next to your computer's screen or a monitor mount that lets you position the UltraView directly on the side of your screen. Ether way, it's a clever reflection of what's going on behind you. Call for pricing and options.