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We’re seeing more and more examples of “linkjacking” here on dzone.com, and I am wondering whether you guys feel this is a problem we should try to address? Wikipedia defines linkjacking as follows:

Linkjacking (a blend of “link” and “hijacking”) is submitting a link to a popular-link website, such as Reddit or Digg, which routes visitors through to a middleman website which then points to the real content, effectively getting one extra hit to a personal page for every interested person clicking from the Reddit or Digg link, who was looking for the content in the first place.

It’s really irritating to click a link that sounds intriguing, only to find yourself carried to someone’s blog with a 3-sentence entry that contains the real link to the page you were actually trying to visit. Is this a problem? Is this something we should prohibit on dzone.com?

This is a blog written by Rick Ross, Matt Schmidt and Mike Urban – the developers of dzone.com. Here you will find a mix of news and insights about our developer-focused social bookmarking community and the software that runs it.

Thanks for your interest, and we hope you’ll enjoy reading this blog. We don’t post here every day, but we’ll try to be diligent about posting whenever there’s something new or significant happening at the site.

Please feel free to email if you need to get in touch. You can reach us at feedback@dzone.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

Hello, and welcome to dzone: fresh from the developers. This is where we will share news and information about what’s happening behind the scenes in the continuing development of dzone.com.

We have been working on the site and its underlying service infrastructure for quite a while, but the discussion so far has been almost entirely internal. We much prefer to have this blog so we can communicate and interact with a broader audience. Hopefully some of you will be interested in what we have to say.

I’m Rick Ross, and I’m one of the ringleaders behind this project. During 2005 I became intrigued with the “social filtering” process which differentiates newer sites like reddit, del.icio.us and digg from older sites like Slashdot and my own Javalobby.org. It became apparent that the model was a strong one, but the noise factor at digg was simply drowning out most of the developer-focused links I would potentially be interested in. Digg was doing great things for its general audience, but what about those of us who were concerned principally with developer topics?

That was the question that eventually led to the birth of dzone.com. I shared my thoughts with my colleages, Matt Schmidt and Mike Urban, and it turned out they felt the same as I did. The three of us (in hindsight, “delusionally”) persuaded ourselves we could develop a basic social bookmarking app in a week or two, and so we started to sketch it out.

That was cough 3 months ago, so you can see that our preliminary estimation of the project was cough optimistic, at best. The scope did expand, however, and we came to understand that an architecture of a web presentation layer on top of a set of abstracted core services could open up some cool possibilities for the future. A web-facing presentation layer is just the first step, and we expect to see some intriguing alternatives to browser-based access emerge quickly.

We have one simple goal for dzone.com: to provide the world’s best developer bookmarks resource. We hope you’ll enjoy the first fruits of our labor towards that goal, and I can promise you a lot more will follow!

Rick