Uber-blogger Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing) writes up his 17 tips for getting bloggers to write about you. All pretty common sense stuff worth thinking about when you’re trying to build buzz for a project, but one stuck out to me because I’ve still considered hotlinking images to be "bad form":
Don’t worry about "bandwidth stealing." There’s an enormous fooforaw among site operators about people who "hotlink" to images — linking directly to images on an external site, rather than to the page the image came from. Dear site operators: Here’s a quarter, go buy a terabyte from Amazon S3 and stop complaining. Back in the paleolithic era, inlining could add up to real money. If your hosting company is charging you enough for bandwidth in 2008 that you’re still worrying about it, you need a new host. With your URL in your images (see above), every one of those inlining events is just a way of directing traffic back to your site. An inlined image is LOTS cheaper than a Google Ad, and far more targeted. (The same goes for handwringing about "framing" — including an external site inside a frame on a site, rather than just linking to it.)
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