Google Ad Tags

There’s a lot of consternation about Google’s use of SmartTag technology, as reported here.

Diane Vigil has something of a smart rant about the issue and wishes that W3C could apply a specific tag to prevent embedded linking.

However, I’d be surprised if Google actually were to ride roughshod over webmasters by creating commercial links in content without permission - it just doesn’t figure with Google’s general practice so far.

More likely, I’d figure any contextual advertising development would have to be done with webmaster consent - probably with publisher IDs embedded in the pages, and ads only being displayed when such IDs are encountered.

However, already the feature involves the ability to send users to Amazon, so this is a situation that has all the pontential to become ugly is mis-handled.