The Media Drop

On Tuesday, Lost Remote’s Cory Bergman wrote about the fact that there weren’t any more photos showing up all over the Drudge Report. Bergman was discussing the rights issues, but there’s a whole different issue that at least one of the commenters over there discussed - hotlinking.

The fact of the matter is, Matt Drudge has been hotlinking to sites for as long as I can most certainly remember. Hell, I made this a huge issue here at TMD back in June of 2004. And in July 2004, following Gawker’s comments. And in August 2004, when I tried to get the media outlets involved, but was met with deaf ears over and over again. None of this seemed to matter, as Drudge even linked to a shot from the U.S. Navy’s own Website that October of that year. Then I gave up, because it seemed like the attitude was that if you were a “heavy hitter” then no one would do anything about it.
Way back when, I got two responses from media outlets that actually said anything of value. One said that they knew he was doing it, but they didn’t want to lose the traffic he sent. The other, from the AP, said that the organization had no comment at that time. I wonder if finally, someone did something about it, and it actually hit its mark. I guess we’ll know the next time we see images show up on Drudge’s front page. Or maybe he just tried to host images himself, and didn’t like how his site loaded when it autorefreshed every few minutes, when he had to serve up the images and pay for them.

Glad to see someone’s apparently had to join the rest of us.