Hotlinking

When you hotlink to a picture, mp3, or any other file you are stealing from the site owner. Quite often hotlinking hurts other bloggers more than it hurts the big companies "who can afford it. Lovedonnaz has written an interesting post dealing with hotlinking and ways to deal with it.

Hotlinking to pictures is when someone does this:

I like this idea:



And will have to check it out.

If you are not hosting either at a free site or your own website it is better to link like this. Using this method means that your readers can see the picture and yet you are not stealing the bandwith required to link the pic to your site. Some sites still will block a user who has too many visitors but this is a slightly different problem.

I found this discussion about hotlinking at Ask Metafilter.