Here’s another idea that sounds good, but isn’t: It’s sneaky, and, for me most important, will further bewilder and turn off ordinary users.

Utag works like this. Insert a link to a website in your blog but preface it with a utag link. Clicking on the link will take the user to the site linked to, but will add a banner frame at the bottom of the browser window (it used to be at the top but uTag listened to the complaints at put it at the bottom):

This sucks on lots of different levels. For one thing, the URL in the browser window is the uTag URL, not the actual website. Among other things, this means the title of the page itself won’t appear in the browser bar:

(This is what it should say:

Not only is this going to anger websites, but it’s also, presumably, going to be heaven for scammers. 

This banner frame, by the way, will continue to sit there until you type something fresh in the address bar; clicking on links in the page above the bar will not remove the bar. That can only be done by clicking on the x to the right:

which will take you back to the first page you visited within the nasty uTag banner frame link thingy.

The people behind uTag say all this is designed to monetise your links and encourage people to link outwards. It’s true that this is a problem—one thing I hate is the misleading links that appear to go the website or page mentioned in the link, but which in fact direct inwards to another page on the website itself.

But guys, this is not the answer. And here’s why:

• it’s confusing to ordinary users. Big players like About.com might be able to get away with it—tho they shouldn’t—but if this sort of thing happens throughout the web ordinary folk are not going to know which part of a website belongs where.
• it’s theft. You’re doing the very 1990s thing of trying to put your advertising on other people’s pages. This didn’t wash then and it won’t wash now.
• It breaks pages. As outlined above, it undermines the usability of other people’s websites and pages.
• It’s almost certainly a security risk. I don’t know how but I can imagine bad guys loving this kind of thing.
• I’m sure there are other reasons this won’t work. This guy has a few, including the point that if you replace all your outgoing links with uTags, then if the service dies, so will your site in the Google rankings.