John’s Crawlspace

I was reading an interesting article on NYPost. The article was about the CIA and their testing of LSD in the New York subway system in the 50′s. Interesting stuff, and as such, I wanted to share it with a friend.

Normally I’d just copy the URL and IM/email it to someone, but this time, I just highlighted a paragraph and copied it to my clipboard.

When I pasted it into the IM window, I noticed that more than one paragraph was there. In addition to what I had copied, some extra text had made it’s way onto my clipboard. It said “Read more” and provided a URL to the story. Slick, huh?

It’s definitely an interesting link building method. How many people that paste that from their clipboard wouldn’t notice the additional appended sentence? I would be willing to bet at least 30-40%, especially if they’re copy/pasting multiple paragraphs. So when these are being pasted onto social networking sites, forums, and blogs, backlinks to the site are being generated with no effort on the part of the webmaster.

I looked into how this works – actually, my buddy Andy beat me to it. They use a service called Tynt Insight to do this. Javascript is used to send whatever you copied to Tynt’s servers, where a backlink to the page that you’re on is added. There is some speculation that not only is what you copy sent, but also everything that is selected.

Invasion of privacy? Some would say yes. Slashdot says you can block this using Ghostery.

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