If you (and I’m assuming you’re a blogger) were interviewed for a feature in a magazine, you would want to blog about it, right (Rico and Sasha both come to mind)? You’d probably want to post a photo of the publication, and you would definitely want to link to the online edition of the article, right?

What if that publication told you you weren’t allowed to do that?

That’s exactly what Business Week told SmugMug “Head Geek” Don MacAskill after they put him on a feature spread (this links to Google by the way). In the words of the Head Geek himself:

They’ve made it impossible to link to their articles directly (ie, drive money-making traffic to them)… BusinessWeek actually asked us specifically *not* to link to the article. Yes, that’s right, an ad-driven publication doesn’t want us to drive traffic to them. They were kind enough to point us to their User Agreement where, sure enough, they prohibit deep linking.

Gawker, The Blog Herald, and CNET have already picked up the story, and I’m sure several others will be following suit soon.

On a tangent note, the title of Don MacAskill’s post (Why traditional ‘print’ media is doomed) reminds me of Andrew dela Serna’s Three Reasons Why Manila Bulletin’s Website is Stuck in the Stone Age.