Well maybe not so much “killer”… Anyway, Scoble mentions the return of SmartTags due to bloggers choosing to add them to their site. I pretty much never actually go to bloggers sites unless I want to write a blog post about them in which case I open a new tab in NetNewsWire to remind me for later, so I don’t notice them much. When I do see them though they really annoy me – they look far too much like hyperlinks and distract far too much from the content.

It’s odd as well that they never feel relevant. Just because a post mentions the word apple doesn’t mean I want to buy one (the fruit or the computer). What tends to disturb me more though is forums that use this kind of advertising that I’ve been seeing a lot. That’s putting ads in the middle of your users words and I’d consider it outright unethical.

Now using this technology to provide inline definitions would be useful. Interestingly one of our engineers implemented a system like this as a plug-in for EditLive! for Java with the idea of being able to define glossary terms and have the definition display on the page if it’s wanted but be out of the way if not. You can imagine how useful this would be in industries that use a ridiculous number of acronyms and specialized terms.

In fact, on our internal wiki there are a whole bunch of pages dedicated to defining terms and acronyms that are specific to our business which would be really useful to be able to display like this automatically. I find it really annoying to auto-link every capitalized word like most wikis do as it leads to too many links so I’d restrict this to just showing a pop up definition if the page was specifically marked as a definition (or perhaps if it was below a certain length). I’d also change the rendering to something much more subtle than the double green underline that seems to be typically used. Maybe a dotted pastel colour?