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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. ...

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.) ...

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. ...

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). ...

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. ...

When you watch Steve Jobs’ demo of the iPhone, he makes the argument that the fixed keypads on mobile phones have many disadvantages and no advantages. But today plenty of people are talking about the advantages of keypads. With my Pebl, I can get my phone out of my pocket, open it, and call my wife on speed dial using one hand without looking at the screen or the keypad. Jobs pointed out the utility of the mouse in his presentation, but a computer with only a mouse would offer very little in terms of productivity. I can type over 90 words per minute and I never have to look at the keyboard. ...