nCircle VERT Blog

If you happen to visit one of my favourite blogs from Google Reader, you'll come across a page that simply says 'Invalid GET Data' (e.g. Google Reader link to Is Twitter Making Us Dumb? Bloggers, Please Come Back [working link]) . That's it. It seems that Google Reader, like so many other places today, is making use of Google Analytics Campaign Tracking. This means that every link suddenly has 'utm_source', 'utm_content', 'utm_medium', and 'utm_campaign' appended to it. I find this annoying with most sites because I end up trimming the URL before I email it to people or save it as a bookmark. I find it particularly annoying when visiting Securosis because it triggers what I would call a good security measure. It makes perfect sense for a server to send you an error page when it gets unexpected GET or POST data. That would sure make websites a lot more secure... and would be an added counter measure for when people use $_REQUEST instead of $_POST. I became so annoyed that I did a quick Google search and it turns out that quite a few people complain about campaign tracking and look for plugins to manually remove the extraneous data. I don't have a lot to rant about here... just wanted to point out my current annoyance.