The Hotlink Lottery

Great power stems from being in the path of information. I was reminded of that this weekend while watching (across the Limpopo) the media blockade surrounding the recent Zimbabwean election. With this lesson in mind I got to thinking about all the image hotlinking strix.org.uk carries. It's a lot, more than half of my bandwidth, and it costs money.

For the non-technical, hotlinking (or inline linking) is the practice of using files hosted on someone else's server in the HTML of web pages coming from your own server. It seems a perfect externality, shifting hosting costs from one site directly onto another. Site owners - jealous of their content and sensitive to the bottom line - can get very worked up about it. When being derogatory, the practice is referred to as 'leeching', 'bandwidth theft' or 'theft of service'.

I'm not as eager to assume it's a bad thing. If someone likes something on strix.org.uk enough to want to share it with their readers, that's pretty cool. One depressing evening in 2006 I drew a picture and posted it to the blog, a hotlink turned up with it in a greek blog post. What could be a better compliment for someone learning to draw? Sure, it'd be better if the blogger had copied it to their own server and provided an attribution link, but color me pleased. I'm happy for my stuff to get more exposure, hence the copyleft (cc) license.

In the more contemporary Web 2.0 view, hotlinking isn't a big deal. The nature of syndication and data mashing usually requires sources of information that are separate from the applications people use to combine and filter it. Most of the web applications I write hotlink images from other sites, sanctioned by the likes of flickr and youtube, and any number of services - from Google Reader to Babelfish - hotlink strix.org.uk. It's a good thing.

But.. there are some circumstances where the benefits are not as obvious. Those circumstances look like this:

Behold! a LolDuck. I've no idea where it came from, it was found on a forum and to the forums it returned. Such is the way of the LolDuck. The hotlink was copied from post to post and site to site, reproducing virally and exponentially. This site serves one every few seconds, and it's a lot of bandwidth to bear for nothing in return. The benefit? I am now in the path of information.

Since the image comes from strix.org.uk the file referenced by the link can be changed at this end. Thanks to the magic 'Referrer' field it can be done with some discretion, serving any image at all on any site with the hotlink. The LolDuck may not provide a direct benefit but it has created a microphone, an organic, unintentional broadcast system to say anything at all to surfers on hundreds of other sites.

The only question now is... what to say. One can tell where individual people are on the net (Referrer), where they are in the real world (IP address), that they're bored enough to be surfing Lol and can put an image on their monitors. Advertisers would love to be in this position. Most webmasters at this point do something distinctly uncreative; they replace the image with a tiny 'No Hotlinking' graphic and dismiss the opportunity.

Not I, but what to say? 'Vote Obama!', 'Womens Rights Are Human Rights', 'Help A Nun Kick The Habit'. Maybe. PSAs are Plan B. Best idea so far is to interact, to play a game with web surfers and engage them. An image lottery. I gathered together some random funny pictures, some disgusting shock pics, and some hentai (brown paper packages tied up with string, these are a few of my favorite things). The concept is a drinking game to be played with friends, every time the hotlink is loaded an image is chosen at random, if it's hentai, drink! If not, everyone can still laugh and groan at the funny/gross images. Though it needs some refining, the hotlink now looks something like this on forums/myspace:

And like this as a youtube background:

The hotlink directs people back here to play an expanded version of the game, an AdSense banner kicks a few cents toward the hosting costs, and someone gets drunk and giggles at Japanese sex comics. Everybody wins. So, if you came here wondering why there's strange and random crap appearing on your website, now you know. Feel free to copy stuff from strix.org.uk if you'd like to use it. Please link back :-) Thanks.

If anyone has an idea for a better use of this ability (other than Goatse on MySpace), I'd love to hear about it in the comments. Over the course of a day your idea could be broadcast to tens of thousands of people all over the web.