Contextual Scripture “Link Ads”
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I was pondering today and had an interesting idea and I’m wondering if it has already been done. If not, maybe I’ll figure out a way to develop something that does it. I have recently been researching “contextual link ads”. These are ads that are basically random links of words within your blog entries that link back to an advertiser that has paid for that placement. It’s a great idea - people are naturally curious, and want to know what the links within blog posts are. I personally do not think they are annoying, as they do not distract from the content being presented.
That concept got me thinking. What if I were to create a service that does this for scriptural quotes and words of the prophets? You place a piece of javascript on your site, and a central database somewhere references particular words and phrases with scriptures and words of inspiration. It would be very interesting to see the links that appear on your site from that, and what your writing actually references to in the scriptures! What are your thoughts? If I were to do something like this, what would you like to see?
March 9th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
Very interesting idea. It might also be interesting to see an ad block, similar to Google ads, with relevant scriptures or quotes. I can think of two site that you could probably tie into to get the data.
The first is mine, Scripture Tag (http://www.scripturetag.com). It is built around the concept of keyword tagging of the scriptures. I have not built a full API, but each tag is syndicated via RSS and I am sure I could feed you any pieces that you need.
The Second is Connor Boyacks Quoty (http://quoty.connorboyack.com). I know Connor has an API for pulling out quotes on specific keywords so it you may be able to pull in that very easily.
Great idea, let me know if I can help.
March 9th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
Awesome Stewart! I wasn’t aware of scriputuretag, but I think that gives me a huge head start. I was aware of Connor’s quoty. I’ll have to look more at it and see if there can be an application here.
March 10th, 2007 at 11:15 am
Ugh, I *HATE* those stupid contextual link ads. In my opinion it is just noise. Once I realize that a page is using them, the SNR has gone out the window and I can’t even be bothered to look at any of the links on the page. All it is to me at that point is annoying differently-colored words.
Hypertext is about the author providing a link to something useful and relevant. Whoring hyperlinks destroys that relationship between author and reader and just becomes line noise.
March 10th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Usually those link ads are double-underlined, and fairly easy to tell between a normal link and ad link. We deal with other ads - at least these aren’t as obtrusive. And what I’m talking about are just scriptural references and quotes - if you could differ between the reference and a normal link I don’t see why it would be such a big deal.
March 25th, 2007 at 11:39 pm
Richard Miller from the More Good Foundation mentioned to me (a while ago—sorry for the delay) that you were looking for some input on this from me. Your idea would be relatively easy to implement as a WordPress plugin running server-side (no JavaScript). It could dynamically pull from a central database using any keywords that were configured to be “linkified”. Take a look at the code of my LDS Linker plugin for a start. This project isn’t a far cry different from that one—just “linkifying” different stuff—and of course my code is open source so feel free to “borrow” whatever you find useful. You can contact Matt Mullenweg and he’ll be happy to set you up a space on the wp-plugins.org Subversion repository where any folks who want to participate can check code in and out and collaborate on the project. It’s a little out of the realm of my interest, but let me know if you need any help and I’ll be glad to donate some of my time. Cheers!
May 5th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
@Joey Day, thanks for the offer. I’ll take a look at what you’ve got. It may be a bit before I’m able to put this into practice, but gathering ideas right now won’t hurt. I’m thinking several different types of plugins and code to load the links could be in order - a plugin for Wordpress isn’t a bad idea. I think the javascript would be an across-the-board solution I could offer as well. Sorry it took so long for me to reply! (see my post for today)