Salut! knows a web parasite when it sees one. Not a day goes by without the need to clear a few out of the comments boxes, here and at the other Salut! sites, Salut! Sunderland, Salut! Live and Salut! North (though poor, neglected Salut! North probably welcomes attention from anywhere these days).
Indeed, when I don't just delete offending items as spam, I have taken to adding an insult and leaving the comment there - having erased the all-important link to a sex-enhancing, penis-enlarging, hair-restoring, sweat-eliminating or loan-promising product - for all to see. The wording varies from "NB: I am a cretinous - and now linkless - web parasite" to something more specific along "oh no, you don't" lines.
But I am mystified as to where a news "aggregator" site such as newsnow.co.uk enters this sort of murky internet territory.
In January, News International’s Times Online blocked the site. I assume newsnow was one of the sites the News International Europe chief executive James Murdoch had in mind when he later complained about what he calls parasites.
I suppose I can describe only how it works for me. Salut! Sunderland's headlines are picked up by newsnow's sports section and appear on the Sunderland page and, where appropriate, the Premier League page and the pages of other clubs or leagues the items in question deal with.
That is a source of satisfaction, not dismay, for me. It has the effect of sending visitors towards Salut! Sunderland who might otherwise not have made the journey. I am happy, newsnow is presumably happy and, with a bit of luck, the indirect visitor finds enough to please him or her to warrant a return at some later date, without or without a similar prompt.
I make no bones about it: if I can find a way of making this, the parent site, with its much more varied interests (France, the media, travel, food, current affairs), a desirable addition to the newsnow.co.uk sources, I shall use it.
Let us assume Salut! were the size of News International. Until the block was imposed, newsnow would have been sending more traffic my way. But the visitor does not end up in some sectioned-off zone, unable to see what else is available and of benefit only to newsnow for providing the route. Just as at Salut! Sunderland, the trip opens up the whole site to navigation and view.
When I started to write columns for The National, Abu Dhabi, I sought and was readily granted permission to reproduce them here. I naturally add a note to make the article relevant to Salut! readers, and usually a photograph too. There is always a link from the Salut! version, its introduction or footnote, to The National's own website. The editors of the relevant sections left me in no doubt that they welcomed this modest source of additional potential readership and, by looking beneath the Salut! bonnet, I am able to see that http://thenational.ae does indeed benefit a little from the interaction.
Some of the people Salut! sends east, as it were, will linger there, explore what else there is to read, peruse the photo slideshows and, possibly, end up bookmarking the site. If that also happens with readers who reached, or formerly reached, The Times or Sunday Times from newsnow, what harm, precisely, is caused.
If I am being astonishingly naive here, perhaps someone will enlighten me.
And now back to exterminating those genuinely parasitical comments, marginally superior though they may be to phishing e-mails, from my comments fields. Today's batch - mostly in fluent gibberish - came complete with plugs for Megan Fox nude photos, Volvo repair manuals, a serious-looking American site about child custody lawyers and assorted services offered in Spanish and Portuguese.
* Image taken, under Flickr's Creative Commons provisions, from the pages of arnold | inuyaki - to whom thanks.
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