Jamie Mottram, AOL blogger and one of the founding hosts of Sports
Bloggers Live, is leaving AOL to go do
blog stuff for Yahoo Sports. (I blogged a quick mention of it
over in Social
Media Mess.)
Best of luck, he will be missed, etc. etc. But that's not the point of this entry.
Because he is something of a big deal in sports
blogging circles, his career move got mentioned by a bunch of bloggers
(and Jamie was not shy about linking to them from his
entry).
A couple of them used a picture which was familiar to me:
Here it is -- it's a photo I'd used
last year in an entry about moods, and not coincidentally, it's on the first
page of image search results for Jamie Mottram:
Now, I don't have a problem with people using the picture. But I do
note that at least one of them is hotlinking
the picture, which means that they're just pointing to the URL where it
lives in my Hometown space (http://hometown.aol.com/Journals%20Editor/images/blogimages/042106-Jamie-Mottram-Chillin400x300.jpg), instead of hosting the photo on their own server. (I also don't care about this, but this is a teachable moment.)
Many folks who have bandwidth restrictions from their Web hosting
companies get mad when people hotlink their images, because they consider it
"stealing bandwidth." (For example, if the photo is 50K in size, and it gets seen
10,000 times, it means 500,000K [500 megabytes] of data was
transferred, which would count against the photo owner's monthly data
transfer quota. Depending on who your Web host is, you might have to
pay overage fees when you go over quota.
[Note: For services like AOL Journals, AOL Pictures, AOL Hometown, Flickr, Photobucket, etc. you
generally won't have to worry about overage fees, though really excessive data
transfers might result in some throttling access to your stuff until traffic dies down.]
Because of this, a lot of folks would prefer that people save the photo
to their computer and then upload it to their own photo host. That is,
they want you to "steal" their photo instead of "stealing" their
bandwidth, which I always find amusing (but then again, I've not been
stuck with any overage fees yet.)
Why do people hotlink images? Because they're lazy. I've done it myself
occassionally. But even if you're a heartless type with no regard for
any potential bandwidth costs of other poeple, there is one definite
reason to not hotlink images.
When you hotlink an image, you're basically saying to the Web page,
"Show the picture with this name that lives over
there." For example, my photo of Jamie is named
"042106-Jamie-Mottram-Chillin400x300.jpg" and it lives in the
"blogimages" subdirectory of the "images" directory in my Hometown
space. (I uploaded it using the Web-based
file manager).
Now, if you know someone is hotlinking your image, you can really mess
with them. Sure, you could delete the image, leaving them with a broken
image in their page, but that's no fun. However, if you replace the photo with any
other photo, but keep the same file name... since it's just a pointer,
the new photo will show up in the page that's hotlinking to your
photo.
For example, I could do up a version of the photo with an obnoxious
text banner plastered across it ("THE OWNER OF THIS WEB SITE HAS
HERPES," "STOP STEALING THIS IMAGE," etc.)
Or I could replace the image
with something entirely new -- porn, something shocking or graphic,
etc. As long as I give it the same file name, it will show up in the
other guy's page.
Which is why you shouldn't hotlink photos.
Now, note, when you include a photo from your Hometown space (like I
explained
here), you're basically hotlinking from yourself, but it's
okay, since you generally trust yourself, right?
But any time you
hotlink an image from someone else, remember you're depending the image
owner's good grace, mercy or ignorance to prevent them from replacing
the image and displaying whatever they want in your
page.
So don't hotlink images. (And best of luck to Jamie.)
Thanks -- Joe
6 comments:
Yeah. Someone on a religious-based website hotlinked to a pic in my hometown, and as for replacing it, well... goaste works very well.
I felt kind of bad about doing that for a little while, but it passed, and I think they got the message not to bogart my bandwidth.
-Dan
http://thewisdomofadistractedmind.blogspot.com/
A funny idea, Dan, but a warning to others who might try it: if you upload an obscene image to your hometown file space, as Dan claims to have done, you are contravening your Terms of Service agreement with AOL, and can get yourself in some hot water. I can recall the name of one prominent AOL blogger who had every file in his hometown space - and his entire AOL journal - erased. Deleted. Just like that, with no warning or recourse. Be very careful what you put in your hometown space.
-Paul
http://journals.aol.ca/plittle/AuroraWalkingVacation/
Thanks for the TOS explanation, Paul. I'm honestly not that much of a stickler for those things. If someone wishes to go bumbling around my hometown files in search of naughtiness, I'd probably laugh at them more about than I would be upset about anything.
-Dan
I'm a beginner at learning all this and I'm slowly gleaning knowledge on what I can or can't do to make my journal more interesting.
This information has been very helpful to me. I can now understand the rhymes and reason why certain things are no no's.
I've looked up bandwiths and now realise that these people pay for it and it's not free like AOL.
I completely understand it now that you have given this information.
Very interesting and useful.
Many thanks for this I shall save it for future reference.
From Silver Surfer
Jeanie
I do hotlink graphics from one lady's pages which she says is fully linkable and go ahead. But I see that if suddenly she developed a dual evil nature she could wreck havoc and turn my "G" blog into a "XXX" delight.
Now I kinda wish someone would hotlink to something I have on photobucket so I can play with their head. ;o) - Barbara
P.S. How do you find out if someone is hotlinking to you?
Jamie was nice... I'lll miss him.
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