21. If a site is providing useful, relevant content to the consumer, then it is important regardless of any affiliate monitization it may be employing and should be included. If it is nothing more than a spammy site, then it should never be included anyway.

Posted at 2:14PM on Feb 29th 2008 by Karen Garcia

22. Jason said "However, you're taking the typical deceptive marketer approach: I'm not going to answer the question about my deception, let me start by point to other things that might be deceptive in the world (i.e. product placement)."

This could easily become a circular argument. He didn't address his deception so you responded by sort of addressing what he called you on and turning the tables back to him. I can't imagine it's a complicated thing to change the links in the sidebar - I haven't used Blogsmith, but it would be a simple matter of changing a line or two in Wordpress or any other platform that uses some kind of widget to poll Del.icio.us.

If you really feel you should remove sites from Mahalo that use undisclosed links, you shouldn't put your links on del.icio.us at all, since they don't have any way of indicating that the links could benefit you financially. Them not having the mechanism to make that obvious isn't a valid excuse for you to act in a conflict of interest.

For full disclosure: I may benefit from this comment on Jason Calacanis' blog, by way of traffic clicking through to my site and possibly clicking on the one or two affiliate links that exist there. I may also benefit by way of the link from here to my site, through its possible value in the eyes of Google and other search engines. I am not a lawyer and do not play one on TV, so this disclosure statement should not be considered to be legally binding. It's merely a smartassed comment on the discussion at hand :-)

Posted at 11:38PM on Feb 29th 2008 by John

23. I suggest a simple solution: create a standard for denoting AL's.

For example, adding different symbols to the end of each link out, using a different symbol-based on the same design-for each type of affiliate link (such as internal, or one posted by a user).

Posted at 3:31PM on Mar 1st 2008 by Matthew