I gotta say, I’m proud of Jeffrey Dvorkin and the entirety of NPR, both for changing their linking policy and for being big enough to admit that they didn’t understand the medium to begin with.

Comments

I’m puzzled as to why this story is being revived now, a month after they “changed” their police. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have posted it. I’ve seen it on MeFi and Blogroots, also.

Also, NPR *still* is pretending you need permission to link to them. See Cory’s note, posted on Boing Boing after the ombudsman’s statement.

• Posted by: Anita Rowland on Jul 23, 2002, 2:45 PM

I mention it now because I fell out of the loop on the story, and just caught up. Mea culpa!

And I debated a bit about making a disclaimer regarding the “We reserve the right to withdraw permission for any link” line in the policy, but then I realized that NPR truly can “withdraw” someone’s ability to link to something that they don’t like, or at least make it difficult for that person to refer browsers to the NPR page. All they’d have to do is implement code on the server side that checks for referrers that they’ve banned, and redirect those viewers back to the NPR home page (or maybe to an explanatory page).

I know, it’s picking nits, but it’s the way that the thought travelled through my convoluted brain.

• Posted by: Jason Levine on Jul 23, 2002, 3:25 PM
Please note that comments automatically close after 60 days; the comment spammers love to use the older, rarely-viewed pages to work their magic. If comments are closed and you want to let me know something, feel free to use the contact page!