[Tim is on the road and asked me to post a note about this.]
In Tim’s “Search Engine Spam?” post, he wrote:
Many of the text ads on our sites are placed by a company called 3Genius, but many of them come from individual advertisers via our normal ad sales process. Our ad team apparently restricted the range of possible links to travel sites (which seemed plausibly relevant) and a couple of other areas, though affiliate sites such as Osdir.com, servlets.com, and linuxquestions.org, which are O’Reilly branded but which we do not own, have less restrictive policies, which is why you will see ads for cuban cigars or Jack Daniels on osdir.com.
The people at 3Genius, the only company specifically mentioned in the post, asked us to make clear that they run hotel and travel sites, but they do not run any of the other ads mentioned in the post (like the cigar and alcohol sites). They also pointed out that Nat linked to one of their sites in a recent Radar post, citing it as a cool use of Ajax. (Nat didn’t know the site was run by one of our advertisers when he linked to it.) One of the people from 3Genius also posted a long comment on Tim’s post, which is worth reading if you’re interested in the issue.
I realize their are strong opinions on all sides of this debate (certainly including mine), and for some people the nature of the sites is less important than the nature of the links. I do think it’s fair, though, for this company to be clear about which business they are in — travel sites — and which businesses they’re not in.