Observant plasticbag fans will probably have noticed the “How did they get here” box at the bottom of the page – a cunning piece of kit supplied by Stephen’s Web. Concept in a nutshell – publically available referrer log – how did people get to this dumb site anyway – that kind of thing…
Now the interesting part of this whole palaver comes when you have a couple of people both using the system. Let’s say – for example – that 0 fresh decided to use it. And let’s say – for some unknown reason – that person decided to come to plasticbag.org twice. Suddenly it’s on my referrers log. Which means it shows up in the little box at the bottom of the page. Which means that people click on it and go back through to him. Which makes his little box record a referral from me. Which means that the relationship between our two sites starts to become stronger and clearer. People note that plasticbag.org sent twenty-five people to 0 fresh and so come to the site expecting me to have said something. And of course I haven’t. But then people reading plasticbag.org see that five or six people have been referred from 0 fresh. So they go to see what all the fuss is about. This relationship is like a link in the mind that gets stronger the more that it is used – but it’s a link between Stalin and Anusol. Or any two random things that aren’t really connected at all.
So what am I saying? Is the tool useless? No! Is it particularly useful – well it could be, particularly when there actually were people using it to keep track of explicit references to each other. But in the meantime it could be exploited by anyone linking to any site – as long as they both use the system. Suddenly, there are links that last days without the slightest reason, without the slightest connection. At times like that you have to take control – and that’s what I’ve done. No one’s squeezing traffic out of me without me linking to them. But since I can’t stop them getting the traffic – I’m just going to have to bite the bullet and sanction it. Hence yet another bloody link to 0 fresh.