Is this the first shot in the Blog wars? It appears that AOL (who has a new blog service online or coming online very soon) has blocked all links coming from Live Journal. Slashdot points to a thread on the LiveJournal development community about how first it was pictures and then any links.
Evan Martin writes "LiveJournal.com is an open-source weblog site with over a million users, some of whom use AOL. Last week, AOL began blocking all HTTP requests with "www.livejournal.com" Referer headers. This is a common practice by image hosting sites to prevent off-site linking of their images and 'bandwidth theft'. However, in AOL's case, they're blocking everything, not just images, effectively breaking all links to any AOL member's site--but only from LiveJournal. To be clear: nobody on LiveJournal can even make a link to any AOL member site without getting a '404 Not Found' error. We've also heard reports of the same thing happening on AOL properties (Netscape, Compuserve). This concerns us because we have to deal with the support requests: it worked in the past for our users, and it continues to work for other sites, so our users think it's our fault." [Slashdot]
The post about them blocking more than images is about halfway down on the page. I personally hope that this is just some screw-up on AOL's part and not a deliberate attempt to slow down some competition. People have pointed out that AOL can block whatever they want, it is their site. While that may be true, this isn't people just linking to stories on AOL. This is AOL even blocking traffic from Live Journal to someone's personal web space. Which seems like a big difference to me. I hope this is just some silly misunderstanding, as it's pretty lame otherwise. Now the next question is, how long till AOL responds?
