The addition to Web pages in the name of advertising that annoys me most these days is aggressive mouseover behavior attached to links. It seems like I’m visiting more and more Web sites that force me to make sure that I haven’t mistakenly left my mouse pointer over the browser while I’m reading.

Football Outsiders, one of my current favorite Web sites, has an advertising arrangement with a company called ContentLink that uses JavaScript to turn any noun it can find on the page into a link, and attaches large, intrusive tooltips to those links. This article contains many examples.

Today I was reading this article, which “helpfully” offers thumbnails of the pages each link points to, powered by Snap. I guess this is supposed to provide value to users, but it doesn’t. It’s just harassment.

The tooltips cover up text on the page, are jarring when they appear, and make navigating a Web page feel like crossing a mine field. Make it stop, please.

Update: Don’t miss the comments. Eric Wingren of snap.com is asking people for feedback on how they can improve their service.

Adobe evangelist Andrew Shebanow puts forth an argument:

So if you are looking to build a cross-platform application without making those kinds of investments, what are your choices? Basically, you can use HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and/or use the Flash/Flex environment. With Apollo, Adobe is trying to bring those two worlds closer together and bring those technologies to the desktop, and eventually Apollo applications will be able to crossover to the mobile side as well. I personally find this a lot more exciting than a world full of non-portable applications. And Flash/Apollo can make applications with UIs that are as compelling as those of OS X and Vista. (I could make the argument that recent developments in OS X and Vista are really just attempts to bring Flash-style user experiences to the native OS, but that’s a topic for another day.)

This comes after he dismisses Java as basically being too sucky, which I have a hard time arguing with. I hate the idea of replacing good Web interfaces built with HTML and JavaScript with Flash, but the idea of creating desktop (and mobile) applications in Flash is more compelling.

Read the rest.

Quote of the day, courtesy of Tyler Cowen:

The cost of this insurance, in terms of induced inefficiencies, will be high but a secure health care situation is one of the things in life that alone can make a difference between happiness and misery.

One of my second tier resolutions going forward is to use the word “interesting” less frequently. I find myself using it a lot, especially on the link blog. If I see fit to link to something, then it’s interesting, at least to me. No need to redundantly refer to it as interesting on top of that.

Dan Froomkin explains why I don’t put any stock in any of the mea culpas issued by President Bush lately:

Bush has never said: I made a wrong decision in this case, here’s why, and here’s what I learned from it, which is why you can have greater faith in me this time.

By the way, if you’re not reading his White House Briefing on a daily basis, you’re missing out on something essential.

I’ve read a number of blog posts lately that have me wondering what music collection is these days. Before the age of online radio and MP3, it was simple. Your music collection consisted of your library of CDs, or tapes, or records. Now it’s something more ephemeral. I had thought of my music collection as my library of MP3 files, but I’m starting to think there’s more to it than that.

Anil Dash mentioned the other day that his iTunes library got corrupted, and while his MP3 files were fine, his playlists, ratings, and listening history are gone. That’s traumatic. Here’s what he says about it:

I’m surprised by how much grief this causes me. As it turns out, my experience of these songs is determined by the record of how I’ve lived with them — without the information about how I’ve listened to them, and how often, and what I thought of them, they’re just not my songs. It makes sense, at some level; Art without curation or creation without witness leaves a work mute. But as geeks, a lot of us wouldn’t even necessarily see this as data loss — the original files, after all, is still there.

I am certain I would feel the same way. I am attached to my ratings and my listening history. It’s an essential piece of my collection. Indeed, it’s one reason why I haven’t bothered with any of the subscription music services where you can listen to songs from a large online library, but you don’t actually possess any of them, like Rhapsody or Yahoo Music. I even feel a bit of anxiety about listening to CDs in the car, because the songs don’t become part of my listening history.

I’ve seen it argued many times lately that the music system of the future is not an iPod and iTunes, but instead the Sonos system hooked up to a large library of music (like Rhapsody). Tim O’Reilly just linked to such an argument today. That could be OK for me if I could keep track of what I’ve listened to. This is where last.fm could play a role. As long as something can be “scrobbled” you can include it in your listening history, as tracked by last.fm.

I wouldn’t mind not “owning” tracks so much as long as I could include the fact that I’d listened to them in my history. What we need is a way to scrobble satellite radio, scrobble the Sonos, and so forth. If there are more people out there who feel like me when it comes to their music library, it could remove a big mental barrier to buying into such systems.

(The thing last.fm needs is a way to export your profile data, although even if I could export it, I don’t know what I’d do with it. It would just make me feel better.)

Michael Froomkin takes a stab at explaining the status of the consulate where the US arrested some Iranians in Kurdistan this week.

Anyone have any light to shed on the US arrest of Iranian “diplomats” in the Kurdish area of Iraq on Wednesday? Reports are that the US showed up at the “consulate” in the middle of the night with tanks and helicopter gunships, and arrested the six Iranians, who are purported to be diplomats. (Maybe the building really is a consulate and maybe the Iranians really are diplomats, I have no idea.) After the arrest, US wound up in a standoff with Kurdish militiamen when trying to detain more Iranians in a second raid, which ended with the US soldiers being extracted by helicopter (as reported on NPR).

Now Iraq’s foreign minister, a Kurd, says that the Iranians who were captured were in Iraq with the permission of Kurdish authorities.

This bizarre episode leads me to a few questions. The first is, aren’t the Kurds our strongest allies in Iraq? Why are we conducting operations like this without their approval? Secondly, why would the Iranians be targetting US soldiers in the Irbil, the most peaceful area of Iraq? If Iran is working with Iraqis to kill Americans, wouldn’t they be doing so in cooperation with the Shiite militias in southern Iraq, who they have traditionally sponsored? Anyone seen any good answers to these questions? This entire set of incidents leaves me puzzled.

From John Markoff’s iPhone article today:

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

The iPhone, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry.

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

Actually what I want is a little handheld PC with a touch screen interface that I can use in whichever way that I choose. That would be fantastic. I realize that it’s not for every customer, but it would be the ideal phone for me. It’s a shame that Apple is locking down the iPhone. I may still buy one, but I’m wistful about what might have been.

Nick Carr does a good job of explaining how Steve Jobs’ inner control freak is what’s best and worst about Apple.

In his speech tonight, President Bush said that US troops in Baghdad will be operating under new rules of engagement. I can’t help but wonder what that means. It seems to me that the following groups of people are killing innocent Iraqi civilians:

• Sunni insurgents.
• Foreign fighters.
• al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists.
• Pro-Iran Shiite death squads.
• The Mahdi Army (also known as anti-Iran Shiite death squads).
• Real Iraqi soldiers and policemen.
• Fake Iraqi soldiers and policemen.
• Thugs looking to make a buck.
• Kurdish militias.
• Neighborhood militias.
• Foreign contractors who shoot any Iraqis who come too close in the name of force protection.
• US soldiers who shoot any Iraqis who come too close in the name of force protection.
• US aircraft who are attempting to bomb insurgents but hit Iraqi civilians by mistake.

Which of these groups will US soldiers be empowered to shoot at, and won’t they kill even more Iraqi civilians in the process? I’d just like to thank our President again for getting us into an intractable mess that’s going to result in thousands of more deaths and a failed state in the heart of the Middle East.

Oh, and some of the soldiers being deployed to Iraq are being pulled out of the battle in Afghanistan.