OUseful.Info, the blog…

A couple of quick post hoc thoughts to add to Google/Feedburner Link Pollution:

1) there’s an infoskills issue here based on an understanding of what proxied links are, what is superfluous in a URI (Google tracking attributes etc);

2) there’s fun to be had… so for example, @ajcann recently posted on how students are Leicester are getting into the bookmarked resource thing and independently “doing some excellent work on delicious, creating module resources”: Where’s the social?.

Here’s the original link as polluted by Feedburner (I clicked through to the page from Google Reader):
http://scienceoftheinvisible.blogspot.com/2009/11/wheres-social.html
?utm_source=feedburner
&utm_medium=feed
&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SOTI+%28Science+of+the+Invisible%29
&utm_content=Google+Reader

Normally, I would have stripped the tracking cod from the link I made above to Alan’s post. Instead, I used this:
http://scienceoftheinvisible.blogspot.com/2009/11/wheres-social.html
?utm_source=ouseful.info
&utm_medium=blogosphere
&utm_campaign=infoskills,analytics
&utm_content=http://wp.me/p1mEF-EH

(The campaign element is the category I used for this post, the content is the shortcode for the post.)

Don’t ya just love it: tracking code spam :-)

So I’m thinking – maybe I need a WordPress plugin that will preemptively clean all external links of Google tracking codes and then add my own ‘custom’ tracking stuff on instead (under the assumption that the linked to site is running Google Analytics. If it isn’t, then the annotations are just an unsightly irrelevance, or noise in the URI…