Pet Peeves - Unannounced mailto: links

I spent some time recently catching up on reading various blogs. One interesting thing I've noticed as my time's gotten busier over the summer and into the fall is that my blog reading habits have changed - while there are lots of blogs I think have regularly interesting information and perspectives in them, I tend to have a handful that I make a point of reading faithfully, and they tend to be blogs of highly intelligent writers who don't post all that much - as opposed to those of highly intelligent writers who post a whole heck of a lot. I put Tim Bray, Liz Lawley, Jon Udell, and Clay Shirkey in the first category, while relegating folks like Joi Ito and Marc Cantor to the second. It's not that I don't ever read those folks - but I tend to skim through their postings looking for relevance, instead of making a point of reading each post.

At any rate, I was following a link from Marc's Voice to Shelley Powers' Burningbird blog, which I hadn't previously read, and I clicked on a link on the left that just said "Shelley Powers", thinking it would give my some background on who Shelley is and what she's up to. But instead, of course, it was a mailto: link, and just launched my mail client.

I wish people would clearly mark those kinds of links, like "Contact Shelley" or something.