If you post a pin to Pinterest, and it links to an ecommerce site that happens to have an affiliate program, Pinterest modifies the link to add their own affiliate tracking code. If someone clicks through the picture from Pinterest and makes a purchase, Pinterest gets paid. They don’t have any disclosure of this link modification on their site, and so far, while it has been written about, no major news outlet has picked up on the practice or its implications.
Now you know.
I don’t believe this is a bad or unethical business model – I simply think it should be disclosed. The same way we expect Twitter to disclose what a Promoted Tweet is or Google to disclose what the Ads are on the top of our search results. News like this should spread in order to put just the right amount of pressure on the Pinterest team to make this more apparent.
Jason Santa Maria stated something on Twitter yesterday that I think fits here too:
If I like the things you create, nothing makes me happier than giving you money to keep doing it.
I don’t use Pinterest (perhaps I will one day) but people seem to like the service. If they like the service they’ll likely want it to stick around. Maybe they’d be willing to pay for it. Or maybe they’d be willing to accept the fact that Pinterest is generating revenue using affiliate links. Either way, let the people decide.
Well, here is another widget I suggest taking a look at. Whenever any of us geeks order something online we’re feverishly refreshing the delivery status page of our shipper of choice to see where the package is. Well, not anymore. Now you can use 
More benefits of turning off comments
Over four years ago whether a blog should or shouldn’t have comments was a heavily debated topic in the blogging community. Back then I wrote about one possible benefit of disabling comments.
Almost a year ago I wrote about the fact that blogging was ready for disruption. (I still think it is.) And that the new “pro blog recipe” was a blog without comments.
Lately this topic seems to have risen its head again yet not in the same way as it has in the past. In fact, rather than there being a debate for or against a blog having comments it appears that most independent bloggers have resolved that a blog without comments is simply much more enjoyable and manageable while larger outfits still see the need to engage the community.
Matt Gemmell, who recently shut off comments on his personal blog, added a few reasons to the fray. Here is one of his reasons that I have also enjoyed since turning comments off on my personal blog.
When I had comments on I wouldn’t publish anything that I thought may not start a conversation. Which ended up leading me in a direction I simply didn’t want to go in – I was starting conversations for the sake of starting conversations. That isn’t why I have my personal blog and I don’t want it to be. So, off went the comments. And it isn’t because I don’t want to hear the opinions of those that read my blog. It is because I don’t want to write simply for the gratification of receiving comments. It has been very liberating.
There is still a place for comments on blogs. Even personal blogs. Some blogs have very good reasons to have comments on them. In fact, even Jason Kottke turns on comments from time-to-time when they are needed. But there are better examples like Horace Dediu’s Asymco. He has made it plainly clear that he runs Asymco in order to work with his community on figuring out a problem. He wants feedback, questions, answers, rebuttals to his hypothesis and blog comments is his primary way of accomplishing that.
So while the debate rages on – and all debates are good when they furnish constructive conversation – unlike Gemmell I firmly believe it is a matter of choice by the publisher rather than a cut-and-dry answer. There are pros and cons to having comments on or off and, once weighed, the publisher can then make a decision on how he or she would like to run their own blog.