The Silent Penguin

Hmm, I thought about that too, Matthew. I am frequently linking to sites that require a subscription or a login. I used to note that behind the link, but then I stopped doing this based on the following rationale: I am mostly doing my weblogs for myself. I have subscriptions to all those links -- and none of them is really expensive (annually $69 for the WSJ is the most expensive). If someone is interested in the content, there is no reason why he or she cannot become a subscriber too. If he does not want to, that's just fine, but I don't see a necessity to make the effort of putting a note there every time.

I see your point. But I choose to proceed without notifications nevertheless. :-)

So, I guess I need to start subscribing to some of the sites at least then.

Actually I didn't mean you specifically Stefan (perhaps a bit though :-)). Your comment is of course valid and it's your blog.

But wouldn't it be nice if there was perhaps a standardized way of categorizing links like that? I mean an easy way of adding a "subscription needed icon" or something.

Just an idea and of course it won't stop me reading your weblog :-))).

If there was a standard that would be easy to use, I'd be happy to use it.

However, I think that there's a general issue here: Most professional sites that I read these days require some form of authentication. Thus, you would need to differentiate between (a) free registration required, (b) paid subscription required, and (c) others (e.g. Slate which you can read for with this one-day pass).

Not an easy issue.

Yes, that's correct. In the same way I like to annotate links to say German sites so that non-German speakers are warned before clicking on the link. And what about say adult material?

So at the moment we have the following flags:

And probably many more. Ok, it was just a rant anyway :-))).

I meant the following flags:

"subscription"
"language"
"agegroup"

Hehehe, meta-data is tough work.

gowno