08-27-2004, 09:07 PM
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My Mood:  | Re: Green, underlined words?
I appreciate your concern for the boards.
However, in this case, it is a new advertising feature called IntelliTXT.
You will recognize it by the green double underline of words in people's messages.
I have included the text of the original announcement for you below. Quote:
New Advertising Feature
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We have added a new advertising feature to our Site. Initially we will be trialing the service and depending on how well it works we might make it a permanent feature.
What is it?
A piece of software has been added to some of our board's thread pages. Called Intellitxt, it scans each page for both appropriate advertiser key-words and contextual relevancy. If a match is found, a small number of words can be subtly enhanced directly within the page. You will recognize the keywords by the green double underline that distinguishes them from other types of link.
How does it work?
A reader's mouse passing over any highlighted key-words will be presented with a Tool Tip describing an advertiser's product or service. If the reader then chooses to find out more information they can click on the key-word and it will act like an ordinary link taking them to a page belonging to the advertising company. For every click on a highlighted key-word, we will receive a small payment. If the reader is not interested in the advertiser's product or service, they simply read on, with little or no disruption.
Keyword relevancy
The key-word list has been chosen so as to be as relevant as possible to a technology site. For example, words like "acne" and "Atkin diet" will be considered relevant. Words like "community" and "professional" won't be considered relevant to turn into advertiser links no matter how often they might appear.
Why is this being done?
Our site remains free to our users mainly because we want as many people as possible to be able to benefit from all the great content that we have put together. Whilst the site is free to you, we invest time and money in terms of technology and personnel. As I'm sure many will appreciate, there is pressure for us to generate revenue from advertising to cover all of our costs, and this is an opportunity for us to do just that.
What do you need to do?
Nothing. Continue to use the site as you've always used it. If you see any advertiser's products or services that interest you, feel free to click on the link. Hopefully you'll benefit, the advertiser will benefit, and we will benefit too. If not, don't scroll over the keywords and don't click and your reading experience will be uninterrupted.
Feedback
We'd like to hear from you about the service. We certainly expect there to be some concerns, and not everyone will like or use the service. In our experience of introducing new features, some will absolutely hate it, and they'll tell us all about it, and more! As usual, we'll try to respond to all your concerns, although can't promise individual responses. We hope and expect the vast majority will see it as an additional service for those people who are interested, and regardless, will not interrupt your reading experience.
Q&A
What if you can't see it?
The Intellitxt software only operates on Internet Explorer browsers, version 5 and above. So, Mac users, Netscape nerds and Opera lovers will just have to believe them that it's there!
Can the user choose which key words are highlighted?
Nope. And neither can we. A computer program ranks the key-words by "relevancy" and "click price" to determine the most appropriate and highest yielding text link to serve.
What are the keywords?
There are thousands of them. As previously noted, the keyword list has been specifically chosen to be relevant and useful for technology sites such as ours.
Who are the advertisers?
There are currently thousands of advertisers that are using keywords to market themselves. Companies like Google have over 90,000 different advertisers who are spending millions of dollars a year to buy keywords. The advertisers that you might see on this site have been tailored to be relevant for the technology sector so they will likely be familiar to you.
How many highlighted keywords per post?
We will cap the highlighted keywords to a maximum of five per page. Many articles will have zero keywords highlighted as they won't be relevant, some articles may have one or two highlighted words. Some pages may have many more than five relevant keywords, however only five will ever be highlighted.
Haven't I seen this somewhere else?
Yes there are a number of other websites also involved in this program so you may have seen this type of advertising before.
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