I do not believe this!!

O'Reilly have a "sponsored link" scheme called IntelliTXT which dynamically turns words in their articles into links. Not always the same word, but occasionally.

So today I just encountered the weird phenomenon in one of their articles, the word "program" was a link. I didn't follow it immedietely but went on to the next page. Then, thinking it might be the link to the source code, I hit the back-button and went to the text. The link had gone.

Weird.

So I tried a couple of reloads, and then, it was back. However hovering over the link I see it's an advert for a "seo optimization program" (That's programme in UK spelling)

So, O'Reilly have already blemished their good name by accepting paid links designed to boost the advertiser's PageRank while providing no relevant value for the reader. But is there anything more lame (or more destructive of O'Reilly's brand-value among geeks, surely) than an O'Reilly "relevant" ad engine that can't disambiguate different meanings of the word "program"? !!!!